6841
An Interview with Robert Caro and Kurt Vonnegut (1999)
Kurt greeted us in his beautiful 19th century house and in his bare feet (of which more later). As the interview progressed it grew sort of
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,746 posts.
6842
Felix and I
He is young – twenty four – sitting at the black computer table by the wall of his living room. I’m looking at him side-on. He’s silhouetted by the huge window with a gorgeous view of the neighbourhood church. Green trees outside. The sun is shining brightly. It’s summer. Probably “The Hot Summer”, when our friends G…
6843
Only Debate The Non-Linear
I sometimes feel like the course of my career has been one long vacillation1 between being too argumentative and too deferential. I’ve often struggled specifically in work contexts to discern when a debate was worth having. In the moment, it has often been difficult to suss out whether my
6844
Learn about problems, not solutions
Sometimes people ask me what they should learn - they've heard AI is kind of hot, but DevOps is too? What's the best way to get into AI? Should they s
6845
6846
There Is No Magic
The scene was a post-seminar dinner at a homely Vietnamese joint. We had just listened to Jacquet speak at the University of Chicago. A soft-spoken grandfather-like figure, he enjoyed the nearly un…
6847
Gratitude despite the odds
Joseph Brodsky, on being grateful
6848
Get Disciplined, Not Motivated
There's a lot of problems with simple motivation: Motivation is fleeting Motivation comes and goes however it wants. It might not last to the end of the week, end of the day, or even the end of blog post you just read. It's fleeting. Motivation is situational Motivation is based…
6849
Google taught me to turn Impostor Syndrome into an Advantage
My heart was racing. My palms sweating. I was going to be fired.\nPerformance reviews had just ended, and it was time to meet my manager and be told my results. Except I knew what it would say. How else do you rate a programmer who doesn’t code?
6850
March, 19-21: God is a comedian
A stiff drink is recommended
6851
How We Got Sal (KhanAcademy.org) His Dot Com
Update 6/22… It’s 12 years later and I just recently was able to get KhanAcademy.net and KhanAcademy.us to the folks at Khan Academy! It’s great to be able to support my favorite non-profits in a meaningful way. If you’re into domains and watching the drop, add a few of your favorite non-profits to your monitor list…
6852
6853
6854
The Entrepreneur Who Captivated Me
On January 12th, 2012 I went to Airbnb to give a talk about Storm at their tech talk series. It wa...
6855
Nice Security Mindset Example
A real-world one-way function: Alice and Bob procure the same edition of the white pages book for a particular town, say Cambridge. For each letter Alice wants to encrypt, she finds a person in the book whose last name starts with this letter and uses his/her phone number as the encryption of that letter. To decrypt…
6856
Selling a Tiny Project
How I sold my tiny online store builder One Item Store, and how I think anyone can sell their tiny projects online.
6857
Let’s Not Have a Beer
For the first time, I won a major raffle at a recent conference. However, I had to give the prize back since it was a beer dispenser and I don’t drink. If your reaction after reading the last line was “Why don’t you drink?” or “Most of us do and it’s your choice that you missed out.”, then this blog is for you. I’m…
6858
Is work necessary?
I saw this bouncing around Facebook, and I would like to endorse the underlying philosophy:
6859
How I Cured my RSI Pain (2010)
For two years I suffered from severe hand, wrist, and forearm pain while typing. After spending a lot of money on world-class medical professionals and ergonomic products but seeing poor results, I was ultimately able to cure all my pain by reading The Mindbody Prescription (TMP). Now I can type for as long as I want…
6860
Voting from Antarctica
How to vote back home while you're in Antarctica!
6861
Nobody is coming to save your career
I waited years for someone to invest in my career. Nobody came.
6862
Avoiding the Adjective Fallacy
You're reading this, so I'll assume your English is pretty good. What's wrong with these phrases? Do you have a logical reason for why they sound strange? Or…
6863
100+ reactions to 100+ solutions
“Many of us are grappling with OpenAI’s announcement on 6 October. We feel that it is useful to have an updating snapshot of the community’s gut feeling.”
6864
6865
Be Worried
Author's note: I wrote this in March 2023, but just published in October 2025. I held back from publishing this originally for fear that I was being sensationalist. But with the launch of Sora 2, I couldn't not share these thoughts. I only regret I didn't publish it 2 years ago.
6866
The Slow Death of the Power User
There’s a certain kind of person who’s becoming extinct. You’ve probably met one. Maybe you are one. Someone who actually understood the tools they used. Someone who could sit down at an unfamiliar system, poke at it for twenty minutes, and have a working mental model of what it was doing and why. Someone who read…
6867
A List of Open Questions
Misc thoughts, memories, proto-essays, musings, etc.
6868
6869
All the Buns Are Blank
Damn! Remember when these buns had sesame seeds?
6870
My favourite German word
If creators of documentation are prepared to sacrifice its human purpose in order that LLMs can more effectively slurp it up and regurgitate it on demand, then they have meekly accepted values that more properly belong in a dystopian horror story.