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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 602 posts.
After ~7 years, I was done with Clojure . I was writing a some CLI apps , and I hated how long they took to start up. The community at large seemed not to care about this problem, except for the babashka folks. However, I spent long, hard hours banging my head against native-image and it just wasn't working out. It…
"Don't worry, he won't leave the porch. The electric fence hasn't worked in years, but he still won't go past it."
I had a wonderful job, until I didn’t. This is about what happened—and what is still happening.
Bjork is currently promoting a new concert film being released called Cornucopia. She's been releasing new photoshoots and interviews almost every day for th...
A place for me to vent about my current obsessions.
The way we consume content on the internet is increasingly driven by walled-garden platforms and black-box feed algorithms. This shift is making our media diets miserable. Ironically, a solution to the problem predates algorithmic feeds, social media and other forms of informational junk food. It is called RSS (Really…
flow2 | Blog post: 'On 10 Years of Writing a Blog Nobody Reads' in Personal
“Those who have a ‘Why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘How’.” ― Viktor Frankl quoting Friedrich Nietzsche, Man’s Search for Meaning Let me guess: Viktor Frankl calls this feeling the “existential vacuum” in his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was a psychologist who survived the Holocaust, and in this…
I made possibly the simplest chair from an instructable I found. Uses one 8-foot 2"x12" and some very basic cuts.
This was a tough decision, having used Gmail since 2007/2008. However, I had to draw the line and stop giving Google my data for free. The problem with email is …
Let me make the argument why you should start self-hosting more of your personal services.
It’s quite gratifying that Markdown has not only become so popular, but after 21 years, continues to grow in popularity, to the point now where there clearly are a lot of people who seemingly enjoy writing in Markdown more than even I do. But I think it would be a huge mistake for Apple to make Apple Notes a “Markdown…
11 months in The Side Hustle From Hell
What’s odd about you is what’s interesting.
When I was a really small kid, one of my favorite activities was to try and dam up the creek in my backyard. I would carefully move rocks into high walls, pile up leaves, or try patching the holes with sand. The goal was just to see how high I could get the lake, knowing that if I plugged every hole, eventually the…
How high is the stress I am talking about? You are commuting all you think is that you might snap today, you might quit today. That is what I am calling a hi...
The qualities you value most in engineers are also creating your biggest problems. Here’s how to handle this paradox.
I recently got a new notebook and noticed that the speakers would occasionally emit a faint but annoying white noise. This issue was only noticeable in a quiet room when no music or other audio was playing through the speakers.
The Intel 285K CPU in my high-end 2025 Linux PC died again! 😡 Notably, this was the replacement CPU for the original 285K that died in March, and after reading through the reviews of Intel CPUs on my electronics store of choice, many of which (!) mention CPU replacements, I am getting the impression that Intel’s…
Keep your calendar in a plain text file. Calendar.txt is versionable, supports all operating systems and easily syncs with Android mobile phone.
I am still recovering from my failed root canal (and still have one visit to complete the procedure), so I have been hesitant in taking up my regular exercise again because I don't want to distract my immune system from my tooth's healing. So when I went to the gym today for the first time...
I was hired on at Apple in October of 1995. This was what I refer to as Apple’s circling the drain period. Maybe you remember all the doomsaying — speculation that Apple was going to be shuttering soon. It’s a little odd perhaps then that they were hiring at all but apparently Apple reasoned that they nonetheless…
Recently, people have been asking me why I’m pausing Boo to work on a programming language. I think it would actually be cool to write down how I feel.
Reading, writing, cooking, and maybe some other random explorations.
This is the second year I brought my Dad (a now-retired radio engineer and co-host of Geerling Engineering) to Open Sauce, a Bay Area maker faire-like event, dreamed up by William Osman and featuring hundreds of exhibits ranging from mad science, to vintage electronics, to games, to world-record-breaking Rubik's Cube…
And what happens when it's gone.
Why and how to preserve digital content in plaintext format for long-term accessibility and reuse
Although it might seem that AI will make it pointless, I still think it's worth blogging.
