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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 588 posts.
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Give It the Craigslist Test
All the AI design hype got me twitching enough to write about the business risks of working so high-fidelity so fast.
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Sunset at the South Pole
Hunkering down for the winter!
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Names should be cute, not descriptive
A long-standing debate between me and a peer at work has been how we should name services. His position was always that services should be named something descriptive, so that you can infer from the name what it does. My position is that the name should definitely not be descriptive, but should be something cute and…
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Bret Victor update
Dynamicland is still going, just quietly. We closed the Oakland space for covid, but Realtalk development and collaborations have continued -- basically as originally planned, if more slowly due to our small size.
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Stopping at 90%
A common pattern is to stop short of the real finish line for your project. A little evangelism, documentation, and polish can go a long way.
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On the slow productivity of John Wick
I found myself recently, as one does, watching the mini-documentary featurettes included on the DVD for the popular 2014 Keanu Reeves movie, John Wick — ... Read more
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iCloud Drive silently deletes your content
The first time it happened, I was writing a paper. The paragraphs I had just typed vanished into thin air, faster than Time Machine or Backblaze could save them. Gone. The next occurrence was during app development; Xcode suddenly flagged numerous errors in previously error-free code. My recent changes to several…
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Shrinkflation, SanDisk Style
A cheap USB stick and the marketing around it caused disappointment, more at 11.
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The Surprising Power of Documentation
Explore the power of proper documentation in this comprehensive guide. Understand how documentation serves as a secret weapon for CTOs, eliminating guesswork, speeding up onboarding, and enhancing productivity in startups. We delve into the importance of documentation in knowledge sharing, reducing the need for…
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Takkyu-bin: Luggage forwarding in Japan
Please don't roll your big bags around town
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Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022
In late 2021, I had solar panels installed onto the roof of my house. After some bureaucratic delays, the solar panels began producing electricity for me at the beginning of January 2022. I have been tracking the performance of the panels for the last year in order to assess what the financial impact of the panels is…
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The “three things” exercise for getting things out of talks (2011)
(More general advice on going to talks is here . As with all my webpages, feedback is more than welcome!)
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Impacts of lack of sleep
Sleep is important. People vastly underestimate the extent to which not sleeping is harmful, viewing it as a valid trade off for productivity and overlooking all of the longterm negative effects.
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Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)
I’d read a few times that bringing the temperature of a failing drive down will increase its reliability long enough to salvage important files. When the drive in my trusty Powerbook decided one day last week to stop booting and make horrible clicking sounds, I decided to test the theory.
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My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter
It turns out that you can't trust any USB type A power adapter to be within spec.
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Engineers Need to Write
I hated writing in high school.
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Nobody cares about your blog
Nobody cares about your blog, but you should keep writing!
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Asking your customers what they want doesn't work
And how can you figure it out what they really need
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Shields Up
Years and years ago, I helped the Weekly World News make a book. While their periodical was weekly, it certainly wasn’t news. They were just four people in a small office in Florida. They gle…
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How to spend money on your friends without it looking like bribery
Owning things is more socially acceptable than renting them.
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A literary history of fake texts in Apple's marketing materials
Exploring the Applecore style
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Coffee in a Can
Life’s inconveniences, when they happen to you and me, are just that. Inconveniences. When they happen to some people though they end up becoming multi-billion dollar businesses. This is the story of Japan’s canned coffee. One finds at least one vending machine in almost every street in
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A Blog Post with Every HTML Element
Patrick Weaver’s Website
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Getting my library cards onto my phone the hard way
Our local libraries, The Seattle Public Library and the King County Library System, issue pieces of plastic with barcodes printed on the back assigned to your borrower account. These cards are not strictly necessary in 2023; most everything at Seattle libraries is self-service, including circulation, and these…