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How I keep up with AI progress
Last Updated: 30th June 2025
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 668 posts.
272
Narcolepsy is weird but I didn't notice
There are certain kinds of experiences that most human beings know very little about because a) they are rare, b) they can only be felt from the "inside", i.e., by the people who have them, and c) not all of those people choose to, or are good at, writing
273
Social anxiety isn't about being liked
There’s this popular idea that socially anxious folks are dying to be liked.
274
"Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education
When I started thinking about the problems with coding education in 2019, "tutorial hell" was enemy number one. You'd know you were living in it if you:
275
The cost of interrupted work (2023)
You’ve likely read lots of blog posts stating that it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to work after an interruption, context switch, or meeting. Thus, “do you have five minutes” ends up not only costing those few minutes, but instead about half an hour. But where does that number come from?
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Chaos in the Cloudflare Lisbon Office
Cloudflare is now using a wall of waves in our Lisbon, Portugal office to create entropy and strengthen Internet security, turning liquid chaos into secure, unpredictable encryption.
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Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News
HN should be treated as an external comment section for the internet to the extent that it can’t substitute for the internet, much less for your own thinking. At its best, HN is a map to new questions and a window onto new angles. The landscape itself remains elsewhere.
279
Why I'm teaching kids to hack computers
Cybersecurity challenges for iPhone, iPad, and Mac
280
I ditched Spotify and set up my own music stack
{/ truncate /}
281
Spaced repetition memory system (2024)
A spaced-repetition memory system combines the Testing effect and the Spacing effect to enable efficient memorization of many thousands of facts ( Spaced repetition memory systems are extremely efficient ). Some people also use them for a broader set of tasks (see below). Spaced repetition memory systems make memory a…
282
Discworld Rules
And LOTR is brain-rot for technologists
283
The Programmer Identity Crisis
On AI, Creativity, and Craft
284
Compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting
why the death of nuance should scare you -your fav gen z philosopher xx
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Altoids by the Fistful
"In evolution, a maladaptation is a trait that is (or has become) more harmful than helpful, in contrast with an adaptation, which is more helpful than harmful." I went to Wikipedia to look that up, not a large language model.
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One year of keeping a tada list
Sometimes called a to-done list.
288
Why Exercise Is a Miracle Drug
Plus: How to save 100 million lives with 1/400th of our income
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Babel is why I keep blogging with Emacs
Every time I look at someone’s simple static site generation setup for their blog, I feel a pang of envy. I’m sure I could make a decent blogging engine in 2,000 lines of code, and it would be something I’d understand, be proud over, able to extend, and willing to share with others.
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The story of my home made pipe organ (2000)
As the course progressed, I discovered that some of this stuff was actually logical, and also kind of fun. I found myself using the piano room just to play around. I never cared much for attempting to play sheet music, but the idea of hitting keys and getting a sound that was sometimes harmonious was strangely…
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Take something you don’t like and try to like it
it offers lessons on your nature
292
I should have loved biology too
How I went from hating it to being obsessed, the allure of great writing, and a post-scuba-dive moment of clarity
293
Learning Feynman's Trick for Integrals
Among a few other integral tricks and techniques, Feynman's trick was a strong reason that made me love evaluating integrals, and although the technique itself goes back to Leibniz being commonly known as the Leibniz integral rule, it was Richard Feynman who popularized it, which is why it is also referred to as…
294
Kezurou-Kai #39
Kezurou-kai #39 in Itoigawa, Niigata, a handplaning contest where competitors use Japanese planes to take ultra thin shavings of wood
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The Insanity of Being a Software Engineer
Is something I think about often because I can’t help but wonder if most other jobs are like this.
296
The School Car Pickup Line Is a National Embarrassment
Your grandpa probably really did walk 5 miles to school in a foot of snow. A look at the changing numbers for how American students get to school.
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Learning Persian with Anki, ChatGPT and YouTube
I’ve been learning Persian (Farsi) for a while now, and I’m using a bunch of tools for it. The central one is certainly Anki, a spaced repetition app to train memory. I’m creating my own never-ending deck of cards, with different types of content, for different purposes. The most frequent type of cards is grammar…
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PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory
An exposé no one will read, about the widespread falsification of user posts in PhysicsForums, a scientific community founded in 2001. This is a microcosm of the death of the human-written Internet.
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I forced myself to spend a week in Instagram instead of Xcode
This is what happens when you ban yourself from coding
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Don't Become the Machine
I was recently recommended a YouTube video with the following title: Only a slave quantifies its existence through productivity '''''',,,,,,,,,,,'''''....