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Why I don't trade stocks and (probably) neither should you
This post is a more thought out version of my response to friends asking what stocks they should buy. The short answer is: none. Unless you...
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,740 posts.
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A4 Paper Stories
I sometimes resort to a rather common measuring technique that is neither fast, nor accurate, nor recommended by any standards body and yet it hasn't failed me whenever I have had to use it. I will describe it here, though calling it a technique might be overselling it. Please do not use it for installing kitchen…
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You don't get shit you don't ask for
When we were raising money for FlightCaster in Fall 2009, we met with dozens of investors, both VCs and Angels. Most of them turned us down. The investors that did put money into FlightCaster provided us a ton of value, both in terms of their capital and all the support/guidance/networking.
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It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
I’ve spent nearly twenty years blogging, giving talks and releasing open source code. It’s been fantastic for my career, and a huge amount of work. But here’s a useful secret: …
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Intellectual Loneliness
I have a confession to make: I leave most parties early because I'd rather read a book. The world comes to life when I'm surrounded by ideas.
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I am happier writing code by hand
I felt the familiar feeling of depression and lethargy creep in while my eyes darted from watching claude-code work and my phone. “What’s the point of it all?” I thought, LLMs can generate decent-ish and correct-ish looking code while I have more time to do what? doomscroll? This was the third time I gave claude-code…
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In search of the least viewed article on Wikipedia (2022)
Wikipedia sure is popular. The most popular articles in a given week routinely get millions of views. But with 6 million plus articles, Wikipedia has plenty ...
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Seven books I keep close because I love them
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Why my book can be downloaded for free (2014)
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Reading OpenBSD source code daily
I made a new years resolution to read at least one C source file from OpenBSD daily.The goal was to both get better at C and to contribute more to the base s...
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The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated
Some skepticism of vitamin D skepticism
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The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review
The Staff Engineer’s Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change is written by Tanya Reilly and published on October 25, 2022, by O’Reilly Media. Favorite Quotes Early in your career, if you do a great job on something that turns out to be unnecessary, you’ve still done a great job. At the…
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Why I left my tenured academic job
The news is out : I left France, I'm no longer a professor at EURECOM, I joined the Malware Research Team at CISCO Talos, and I moved to beautiful Vienna. Big change :-)
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Melatonin
Melatonin improves sleep, & sleep is valuable
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Bear plus snowflake equals polar bear
The correct answer is: 6. Or 7, if you want to be pedantic and include the newline, but let’s not.
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Mental health in software engineering
I was pacing around my apartment at 2 a.m., palms sweaty, convinced the production database had already gone up in flames. It hadn’t, of course, but my
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Owning my own data, part 1: Integrating a self-hosted calendar solution
The first part of what I hope to be an ongoing series about repatriating and owning my own data and tech. In this post, I describe how I integrated my own self-
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My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix
The right arrow key on my Macbook Pro keyboard stopped working the other day. I say “stopped working”, but technically it works too well now, it is being pressed constantly, which makes the laptop pretty unusable.
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You are not your job
On automation, identity, and why warmth and presence — not technical skill — are the parts of a person that can never be replaced by a model.
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You Will Not Understand This
This is my exit interview from social media. Some of these “services” I abandoned years ago. Others I am still struggling to avoid. From experience, I assume that you, reader, will make it impossible for me to remain ignorant of developments WRT: all of this garbage. What all of this garbage has in common is that it…
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How to sequence your own DNA at home
I have now sequenced my own genome 5 times with an Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION. This means collecting them from a swab, prepping them for sequencing, running them through a sequencer, then doing analysis over them.