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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,740 posts.
I am an indie iPhone developer, and I’ve been working for 3 hours everyday for almost 2 years now. It may not work for everybody, but I started this habit in early 2014, and I have continued to do it since have I found that this is the most productive way to work for me.
It’s okay to not know everything. The world rewards people who develop expertise. When that expertise is unique, it’s developed through direct experience and deliberate reflection.
In 1978, Brian Eno released Ambient 1: Music for Airports, a landmark album in ambient and electronic music. Although it wasn't the first ambient
I'm 99.99% sure that my writing this letter will have no effect, but my conscience tells me to write it anyway. Danziger's cartoon has pushed me out of my lethargy.
I'd like to apologize in advance, but after consulting with my colleagues in other departments at Reality Publishing Corporation, I'm afraid we can't publish your book, "Zero Day: The story of MS17-010", as things stand. However, I'd like to add that it was a gripping read, very well written, and we hope to see more…
It’s important for programmers to continuously challenge themselves in order to avoid creative and technical stagnation.
Trashing legacy software is fun. It creates camaraderie.
Tom Hartmann had not planned to become a Software Mechanic.
On a scale of one to ten, how good of a cog are you? How well do you function in your assigned role? How much of a man or woman are you? How...
I recently appeared with John Gruber on The Talk Show. During the episode, the following exchange took place: @gruber: “How do you pronounce the ‘at’ symbol?” @chockenberry: “At” @gruber: “Right” Another @thetalkshow gem. — Jim Lipsey (@Jim_Lipsey) March 24, 2014 When it comes to naming characters, the Unicode…
This is by my brother, Sam. I arrived to Arizona late Saturday, after learning that my brother has only a few days left before cancer ends him. Jake’s wife, Bess, confessed that she had neither the…
Building a battery powered e-ink weather forecast display for our home. This was a fun Raspberry Pi project.
– Some cows in the fields. Brain Fog My brain is not the same as it was a few years ago. When I started working as a Software Engineer, everything was novel and mentally demanding. I notably remember how during my first professional months I’d come back home and just go straight to bed due to the mental exhaustion of…
It’s hard to set your emotions aside when you’re faced with a difficult decision. This is problematic, since our emotions often cause us to make the wrong decision in important areas of life, including in our relationships, our finances, and our health.
This is going to sound cornier than a bucket of Jiffy-Pop, but it is a profound irony that a man with such a big and beautiful figurative heart could have such a lousy literal one.
In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held dire...
tldr: * I installed console-only Debian on an old laptop (no desktop OS at all) * I added some packages to make it work better for writing: * network-manager for connecting to hotspots while I'm away * kmscon for custom fonts and more than 16 colors in the tty * tmux for
In the early 1960s, Richard Feynman gave a series of undergraduate lectures that were collected into a book called the Feynman Lectures on Physics. Absent from
Preparing to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
My writing has recently prompted an anonymous commenter to declare that people like me are what's wrong with the world. Oh joy! – finally, after all these years of doing evil, some recognition! Excited, I decided to share one of my battle-tested evil tips, which never ever failed evil me.
Some advice about love & death followed by a meandering eulogy.
My bout with colon cancer at age 34 in 2020
Update (01.08.2025): fixed broken link, typo, clarified problematic behaviour For a number of years now I have a MacBook Pro Silicon M1 Max. It worked beautifully. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, I started noticing that the battery drained over night when I left the notebook somewhere, not connected to power. This got…
There's been lots of buzz on the topic of whether or not you should learn to code. As an engineer, I don't have unbiased thoughts on the matter. I tweeted Jeff
