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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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What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
Here’s my story… About 20 years ago or so, I was at a Salvation Army auction one morning. They were selling of tons (literally) of junk they’d had donated to them over the last few year…
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I don't want to read what you didn't write
Intentional writing will likely become more valuable.
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An odd discovery on Spotify
New releases; good catastrophes; an alluring and unnerving encounter.
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An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
I made a messaging app for my family and my family only.
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I should have loved biology
In biology class, biology wasn't presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing.
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15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram
How Microsoft continvoucly morged my Git branching diagram.
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I moved my digital stack to Europe
On digital sovereignty, and why European cloud is better than you think
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I'm going back to writing code by hand
I vibe-coded a GPU-aware Kubernetes TUI for 7 months, archived it, and started over. Here's what AI gets wrong when projects grow complex.
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I Still Use RSS
Usable Security, Human-Computer Interaction & AI, from a UNIX perspective.
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Fixing Macs door to door
Fun stories from my time working as an AppleCare Dispatch contractor going door to door in Chicago.
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Spaced repetition systems have gotten better
Spaced repetition systems are a well-known way to efficiently learn material. Recent innovations have applied machine learning to greatly improve their scheduling.
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Write Code Every Day
Last fall, work on my coding side projects came to a head: I wasn’t making adequate progress and I couldn’t find a way to get more done without sacrificing my ability to do effective work at Khan Academy .
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Programming books you might want to consider reading
There are a lot of “12 CS books every programmer must read” lists floating around out there. That's nonsense. The field is too broad for almost any topic to be required reading for all programmers, and even if a topic is that important, people's learning preferences differ too much for any book on that topic to be the…
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Some terrible personal news
Cindy Cutts, my wife and best friend, passed away earlier this week. While I was traveling for work recently, Cindy went to visit her family in Omaha, Nebraska. On Sunday, while enjoying time with …
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I quit the tech industry
This Friday, June 12, will be my last day at Yelp. I don’t intend to look for another tech job. Or another job at all. Ever.
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Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight
Somewhere around 1:00 am yesterday, my Airbnb.com horror story was picked up by Hacker News ; to say this story has gone viral in the past ...
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Scratch is a big deal
While none of us were paying attention, Scratch has transformed from a programming language for kids to a massive online community of self-guided, student-pr...
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Leukemia Has Won
Despite my best efforts over the past two and a half years, the leukemia has won. Due to liver inflammation and GvHD, the liver is too damaged to continue with treatment and there are no furth…
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“This is not the computer for you”
There is a certain kind of computer review that is really a permission slip. It tells you what you’re allowed to want. It locates you in a taxonomy — student, creative, professional, power user — and assigns you a product. It is helpful. It is responsible. It has very little interest in what you might become.
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Getting better at Linux with mini-projects
The first thing I wanted to learn more about was UNIX since Linux is a UNIX-like operating system. I also never really felt that I fully understood what exactly UNIX was, besides being a family of fairly similar operating systems.
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Aaron, 5 years later
I was in the back left seat of a minivan driving from New York City to Atlantic City. We were a little ways down the NJ turnpike. I was playing Zoo Keeper Battle on my newly gifted tablet. My stomach was filled with a pastrami sandwich .
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Thinkpad X210
A couple years ago, I used an old Thinkpad while my MacBook was being repaired. I enjoyed the experience so much that I ended up getting a Thinkpad X62 (an X61 chassis with modern internals). Last S…
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I'm OK being left behind, thanks
Many years ago, someone tried to get me into cryptocurrencies. "They're the future of money!" they said. I replied saying that I'd rather wait until they were more useful, less volatile, easier to use, and utterly reliable. "You don't want to get left behind, do you?" They countered. That struck me as a bizarre…
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Firefox Was Always Enough
There are many concerns about Mozilla right now, and reason to be concerned. While I am no longer with Mozilla, it’s still a place that supported me for many years; I believe in Mozilla and want the project to succeed.