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Plans you're not supposed to talk about
When does talking about a plan ruin it? Marriage, CO2, religion, self-promotion, edgelords, and Chinese medicine.
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,925 posts.
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Write more "useless" software
After my last blog post about Hurl, someone asked me, and I quote: "... why?" The simple answer is "for the joke." But the longer answer is that useless software [1] is a fantastic way to explore and experience the joy of computing. Play is an important part of exploration and joy.
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Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down
When I moved to a new apartment with my family, the cable company we were used to wasn't available. We had to settle for Dish Network. I wasn't too happy about making that switch, but something on the
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Just don’t
Sometimes it’s wrong to begin a phrase with the word “just”. I offer as evidence two such situations. I think there’s a common thread to be drawn.
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Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple
I retired a year and a half ago after having worked for twenty-six years as a programmer for Apple. I’m not sure which would have been more surprising: if I had continued programming in my spare time after I had retired or if I never programmed again.
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Interested in improving your relationships? Try Nonviolent Communication
Nonviolent communication (NVC) is a popular method of conflict resolution that privileges unbiased evidence and specificity.
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I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS
Monday of last week I was all excited. I had just gotten the green light to start prototyping a new Progressive Web App for a client I've been working with.
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The Depression Thing
the depression thing: a neat story about depression and mental health. By Zach Holman.
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Bored People Quit
Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It's written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don't ha
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I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government
Recently I learned that the US government offers a little gift called I-bonds, and that this is the month to buy them. Depending on your perspective, I-bonds are either free money or the only true money storage. They're zero-risk bonds with an interest rate that always matches or exceeds inflation. The interest rate…
282
Being Raised by the Internet
I grew up relatively poor. I was fortunate enough to have a roof over my head, clean water, electricity, a computer, internet, and cable tv. But food was often harder to come by. This may seem like a contradiction, but when your mom has left to marry her uncle and your dad has schizophrenia, you aren’t really in…
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Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
We used to control apps like Facebook and Instagram with our own choices. They became daily comforts, making the world seem a little bit smaller and closer by bringing the people that we cared about together in to one place.
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2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
The meme will no longer be a dream.
286
How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
LLMs are used for any things. Learning new things is one of the top use cases.
287
What It's Like to Fail
How one man went from writing jokes for Roseanne to homeless, and how he fought his way back using Craigslist.
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The bottleneck might be the air in the room
You gather your most expensive people into a room to make your most important decisions. Then, somewhere in the second hour, the room quietly gets worse at making them. Not the people. The room.
289
My FOSS Story
I’d like to break from my normal tradition of focusing almost strictly on technical content and share a bit of my own personal relationship with Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). While everyone is different, my hope is that sharing my perspective will help build understanding, empathy and trust.
290
My Friends and I Bought an Island
As long as I've remembered, I've wanted to buy a private island. Having a random patch of land somewhere holds almost no appeal, but an island is totally different. An island is li...
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E-ink is so Retropunk
I’ve long been struggling to describe why e-ink is so much fun for me, but Ithink I’ve finally realized what it is: e-ink is just so so so retropunk.
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Dopamine Fracking
The act of pumping immense, disproportionate resources into a previously casual or complex and layered activity to forcefully extract and squeeze out the purest, most concentrated dopamine hit
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We all dodged a bullet
That NPM attack could have been so much worse.
297
Why I will never buy another Samsung device
I’ve been on Nexuses and Pixels since Nexus one. Stock-or-nothing was me. However, the mobile phone market has become a bit stale and…
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A simple system I’m using to stay in touch with hundreds of people
Staying in touch with people is one of these asymmetric habits that require little effort, time and resources but has an unlimited upside.
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Overly analytical guide to escorting
The Overly Analytical Guide to Escorting
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We mourn our craft
I didn’t ask for this and neither did you. I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some…