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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,740 posts.
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Embrace the Grind
Sometimes, programming feels like magic: you chant some arcane incantation and a fleet of robots do your bidding. But sometimes, magic is mundane. If you’re willing to embrace the grind, you can pull off the impossible.
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The days are long but the decades are short
I turned 30 last week and a friend asked me if I'd figured out any life advice in the past decade worth passing on. I'm somewhat hesitant to publish this because I think these lists usually seem...
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I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea
When you talk about Papua New Guinea, people may say, oh, is that the place where:
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“I have toyota corola”
Modern cars have fancy infotainment setups, big screens and all sorts of computers with networked functionality built-in. Part of that fanciness is increasingly often a curl install. curl is a part of the standard GenIVI and Tizen offers for cars and is used in lots of other independent software installs too. This…
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Always Invite Anna
Sometimes the people who need invitations most are the ones who always decline them.
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The day Windows died
As a longtime user of Windows, it was my first choice when preparing the first computer for my son. But that didn't work out as expected.
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Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
Journalists should stop saying that the evidence is just correlational
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Hunting Down My Son's Killer
To find it, a team of scientists at Duke University used whole-exome sequencing (a protein-focused variant of whole-genome sequencing) on me, my wife and my son.
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Making Hard Things Easy
New talk: Making Hard Things Easy
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Installing a payphone in my house
When I was growing up in the 90s, I remember wanting to get on the Internet. My parents weren’t going to help me, so I called up an ISP and said I wanted to set up an account. They asked for my name and I gave them a fake name. And then they asked for a credit card number and I told them I had to find my wallet and…
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The Website Obesity Crisis
This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 29, 2015, at the Web Directions conference in Sydney. [ 53 minute video ].
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Did you lose your AirPods?
Reuniting AirPods with a few clever tricks
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Googler... ex-Googler
My role at Google was eliminated.
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Bits of advice I wish I had known
UPDATE Several years ago on my 68th birthday I wrote up 68 bits of advice for my adult children, and posted them here. The bits were extremely popular, and they were widely shared by others. I was encouraged to write … Continue reading →
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Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
I have been coaching several experienced software engineers to further grow professionally, since transitioning [https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/things-ive-learned-transitioning-from-engineer-to-engineering-manager/] to being an engineering manager. I have noticed a few skills that people often underestimate the…
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Cat-proofing a cat feeding machine
Furiosa’s Cat Feeder
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Questions
Some questions that I find interesting. I've omitted some that are related to Stripe. ( Pointers to interesting readings on these topics are always welcome, as are pointers to responses.)
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I'm helping my dog vibe code games
My cavapoo Momo vibe coded playable Godot games. All I had to do was teach her to type, route her input to Claude Code, and build the right tools.
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Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid
Modern cars are computers on wheels that send home nonstop telemetry about you. In this post I remove my 2024 RAV4 Hybrid's modem and GPS to prevent that :)
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I spent eleven years working on this Line Rider track
I remember when I first discovered Line Rider, that Flash game from 2006 with the simple premise of drawing a track for a sledder to ride…
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Intentionally making close friends
One of the most valuable experiments I ever ran was intentionally practicing the skill of making close friends, and this directly led to most of my friends today. This post is the story of that experiment, and distills the lessons learned
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I Met Paul Graham Once
In their rush to conform, to obey, are tech industry leaders planning to discriminate against me?