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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 613 posts.
When you write a document or essay, you are posing a question and then answering it. For example, a PRD answers the question, “What should we build?” A technical spec answers, “How should we build it?” Sometimes the question is more difficult to answer—“What are we even trying to accomplish?” And with every attempt at…
I need to make a painful confession: somehow, LinkedIn has become an important social network to me. This isn’t necessarily due to LinkedIn’s sparkling competence, of course. To the contrary, LinkedIn is the Gerald Ford of social networks: the normal one that was left standing as the Richard Nixons and the Spiro…
I am a software engineer, and I used to enjoy arguing with people for technical correctness. Code reviews, design meetings, mailing-list threads, dinner tables. If someone was wrong, I wanted them to know it, and I wanted them to know exactly why. I collected counterarguments the way I collected patches. I believed…
Sorry Peter. — I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And this Guy always asks some variant of the same question: aren't you worried AI is taking your job? I glance around and see a…
I came across a video by Simple Lucas describing a routine to improve focus and productivity. The routine was basically: Don’t use any screens/entertainment when trying to focus on work. When you start to feel mentally drained, sit and stare at a wall for x minutes to recover focus. I’ve been trying it, and it’s a…
Programming is fun!
Owning a tablet Amazon kept shutting down: CVE-2022-38181, four AI models, five months
The surprisingly difficult ordeal of sending a decade-old MacBook to a friend in a Ugandan refugee camp.
Who were the most popular personal bloggers of 2025, and what made them successful on Hacker News?
This one is about my friend, Aaron. I met him at school, and in our first year when we were eleven years old I told him I wanted to be his best friend but he…
A post called Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them. has been doing the rounds over the last few days, making it pretty high on Hacker News, and I've had it sent to me many times with an 'is this true?' kind of vibe. It's written for
Every website I visit, I steal a button from it. Check out my stash!
It was around January 2020. I became the head coach of a youth basketball team.
Or how not to do a culture fit interview
Your favourite ROP gadget
I asked Jev and 13 other decision models the Trolley Problem.
Here’s a product feature which the world is going to need a whole lot more of over the coming months and years: default hard budget caps. I’m talking about the …
I just wanted to do an internship in Europe so it would be easier to find a job after graduation. That internship completely changed my life.
Substack is convenient, but treat it as a distribution tool for your content. Your content should live on an independently owned website, which has a domain name you control and own. This way, you …
Copyright, Terry Bisson, 1991 Originally published in OMNI, 1991, and featured in HARPER’S and around the internet since. It has even made its way into several books on consciousness and brain science. I’m surprised, pleased, and proud. But please do not reprint, perform, alter or adapt in any way without first…
Reading is important to me. While I’m not a quick reader nor an especially voracious one, I have found that long-form reading has had a profound influence on me over my life.
Last week I launched a project called Dark Hours, which was a website utility to give you an idea of what could be seen in the sky that night. A developer who …
A fabulously gay blind Romance author.
You saw me carrying our baby and food. There was more happening in our family that night.
Tutorial for tying the Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot, in which the laces are formed into two loops, both of which are passed through the “hole” in the middle.
Carrying on in the face of creative devaluation.
When I get together with my friends in the industry, I feel a little guilty about how much I love my job. This is a tough time to be a software engineer. The…
My CTO leaned back in our 1-on-1 and said something that sounded almost threatening: "You want to get promoted? Try to take my position."
