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Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,740 posts.
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My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
The biggest transition for me when I started college was learning to get organized. There was a point when I couldn't just remember everything in my head. And having to constantly keep track of things was distracting me from whatever task I was doing at the moment.
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Which Emoji Scissors Close?
Ah, scissors. They’re important enough that we have an emoji for them. On your device, it appears as ✂️. Unlike the real world tool it represents, the emoji’s job is to convey the idea, especially at small sizes. It doesn’t need to be able to swing or cut things. Nevertheless, let’s judge them on that irrelevant…
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But what if I want a faster horse?
But what if I really want a faster horse? | exotext
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I started a paper website business
I started a business that lets you build websites using pen and paper. In the process I went viral on Twitter, made $1,000 in two days, and blew $720 on 100 paper notebooks from Alibaba.
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I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it
How I learned the old truth that when building a software product and selling it to people, "building" is just the beginning. And often, it's the easiest part.
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Writing by hand is good for your brain
Because I am known to write using a fountain pen on paper, a number of people have pointed me to this post and its underlying research. I won’t rehash what is said in those sources, but the gist of it is that when you write things down by hand you’re recruiting more of your brain, which is a good thing.
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100 years of whatever this will be
What if all these weird tech trends actually add up to something? Last time, we explored why various bits of trendy technology are, in my o...
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A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work
How in 1982, the author successfully hacked his way out of having to fill in potholes.
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Everything I own, owned
Turning Claude loose on the firmware of five USB and WiFi peripherals, and finding a command shell in a microphone, a defeatable webcam activity LED, and unauthenticated memory writes over the network.
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Console.mihai();
Update: Mihai consistently defied people that told him how long he had. It's over 3 months since he was given several weeks , and years since he was given months. He died on 23 April 2015.
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I'd rather read the prompt
I have literally never seen LLM writing that actually improved my life.
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Can we have the day off?
So, apparently we are at the cusp of the entire world’s white collar workforce (and, by extension, much of the US workforce) undergoing a revolution in productivity. AI is the technology that is going to revolutionize the way we work, the way we interact with the world, the way we learn, the way we socialize, and all…
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Filing the corners off my MacBooks
I file the sharp corners off my MacBooks. People like to freak out about this, so I wanted to post it here to make sure that everyone who wants to freak out about it gets the opportunity to do so.
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I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file
Writing about software, systems, and the craft of building things.
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I got pwned by my cloud costs
I have been, and still remain, a massive proponent of "the cloud". I built Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) as a cloud-first service that took advantage of modern cloud paradigms such as Azure Table Storage to massively drive down costs at crazy levels of performance I
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Dsxyliea
A friend who has dyslexia described to me how she experiences reading. She can read, but it takes a lot of concentration, and the letters seems to “jump around”.
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This is a web page
We've become obsessed with fancy designs, responsive layouts, and scripts that do magical things.
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Om Malik has died
Om Malik passed away on June 24, 2026, at Stanford Hospital after a long health journey with his heart. He was surrounded by family and friends. We invite you to share your remembrances of Om in th…
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My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account
This weekend I wanted to create a new App in Azure so I could help a local nonprofit automate one of their donor relations processes via email through Office 365. So I tried registering an app by visiting the App Registration Portal. I signed in to my personal Microsoft account, clicked 'New registration', then was…
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Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
rant about me wasting time
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This Page is Designed to Last
The end of the year is an opportunity to clean up and reset for the upcoming new semester. I found myself clearing out old bookmarks—yes, bookmarks: that formerly beloved browser feature that seems to have lost the battle to 'address bar autocomplete'. But this nostalgic act of tidying led me to despair.
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I miss thinking hard
AI has changed the experience of being an engineer, starving my Thinker side while satisfying the Builder ...
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Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure
Some of Stephen Wolfram’s “productivity hacks” to make his days and projects more productive. Daily life, desk environment, outside the office, presentation setup, filesystem organization, Wolfram Notebook systems, databases, personal analytics.