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Doing the thing is doing the thing
Software Engineer, LITM
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 613 posts.
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A dot a day keeps the clutter away
The simplest organization system I've tried is a sheet of colored dot stickers. It's also the best.
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God sleeps in the minerals
I took this snapshot, and the rest of them, at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County’s Unearthed: Raw Beauty exhibition yesterday. Enjoy.
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I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978
A story about Disneyland's Space Mountain and a 10-year-old inventor.
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Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity
How Bill Watterson Stuck to His Guns — and Vanished
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What Is a Dickover?
dickover — a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of…
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Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"
In 2000, Douglas Adams made an interesting observation that I keep returning to. A user on Slashdot named “FascDot Killed My Pr” had asked the following question (where HGttG = Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy): Comedy….or Tragedy? First, a big thank-you. You’ve made a lasting contribution to “our” culture (or should…
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The Hunt for Dark Breakfast
With a theoretical model of breakfast, can we derive the existence of “dark breakfasts,” breakfasts that we know must exist, but have never observed?
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Good software knows when to stop
Good software knows what problem it solves and what needs to be tackled by another tool
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What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard
What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard.
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Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock
I got a message from a friend today which read along the lines of "I know we were going to meet in Edinburgh today, but do you fancy meeting in Portobello instead and trying to fix the clock in the old police station with me?"
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Google broke my heart
For years, I thought of Google as a trustworthy helper on the Web. Especially where it mattered most, removing pirated copies of my books from Google...
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How will the miracle happen today?
When I was in my twenties I would hitchhike to work every day. I’d walk down three blocks to Route 22 in New Jersey, stick out my thumb and wait for a ride to work. Someone always picked me up. … Continue reading →
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The Real Luxuries In Life
Labor Day weekend has always been the back to school marker for me. I'm 60, closing in on 61, and thinking a lot more about what I actually care about. Amy texted me a list yesterday.
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Why I love FreeBSD
A personal reflection on my first encounter with FreeBSD in 2002, how it shaped the way I design and run systems, and why its philosophy, stability, and community still matter to me more than twenty years later.
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I rebooted my social life
Some self-help for the New Year
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98% isn't much
98% sounds like a lot. If someone wins the lottery 98% of the times they play, they are clearly blessed. Getting a top mark (e.g.: 10/10) on exams 98% of the time will likely lead to an honour diploma.
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September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy
How a Pole sees the world in September 2026: a scrolling essay that follows one closed strait into fuel, food, bonds, defence and demography.
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Warranty Void If Regenerated
Tom Hartmann had not planned to become a Software Mechanic.
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De-Brainrot Vacations
– 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…
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Om
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.
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Time to talk about my writerdeck
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
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Grieving the loss of details
I’ve been thinking about where I stand in respect to the current state of the industry. This is more of a journal note than a post, apologies for that. I usually leave this stuff private, but I thought I’d post this as a trial in case someone relates to this experience and feels less alone. All opinions are my own.
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10 years of personal finances in plain text files
I've been tracking my finances using Beancount in plain text files for 10 years. Here are the numbers, the workflow, and why I believe plaintext accounting will outlive any app.
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What shall I teach my son?
Yesterday, the title The End of Education by Neil Postman called to me from my bookshelf, whispering that it might be the right book at the right time. It was. Published in 1995, it was surprisingly appropriate balm for the soul of a confused programmer and soon-to-be father.
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Doing nothing at work
Many engineers should be doing less work. I don’t necessarily mean producing less code or fewer changes, but literally working fewer hours in the day. When they…