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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 662 posts.
I became a citizen of Japan. Let me share about it. Some is my anecdotal experience, some my opinion, and some facts. Parsing which of these is what in each sentence is not going to happen. EDIT: I have seen some online reaction to this, and appreciate your kind comments. If you are thinking abou
Documentation and guides from the team at Fly.io.
A brief history of fish sauce, from Ancient Asian recipes, Roman times, and through to today's many (delicious) uses.
So… Here we are again. Today, after a minor disaster with my Obsidian vault, I decided to restore from Time Machine, and… I realized that it had silently ...
What my father taught me.
Matt Kirkland is a designer. He probably reads too much.
Do not apologize for replying late to my email par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
A blog about software craft and quality
My father passed recently, and he was twice my age. I am approximately the same age that he was when I was born, and I am now “the old generation” - there’s no one left in the generation above me.
On human connection after the Singularity.
I recently decided to, finally, have my iPhone fixed, only to realize a few hours later that my AppleCare could have covered it. I was in a low mood until my partner suggested that I was robbing myself of a good decision. The iPhone needed fixing, and procrastinating on it wasn’t useful. Deciding to do […]
I’ve been a lifelong reader, which has proved a fragile habit in our era of endless trivial distraction. While books and e-ink readers solve the problem of competition for attention, they can’t compete with a phone for convenience. That tiny device in my pocket has made reading both easier and more vulnerable to…
A week ago, I wrote about how Generative and Agentic AI may be amplifying what I’ve been calling cognitive debt: the accumulated gap between a system’s evolving structure and a team’s shared unders...
“We see something that works, and then we understand it.” (Thomas Dullien) It is a deeper insight than it seems. Young people spend years in school learning the reverse: understanding happens before progress. That is the linear theory of innovation. So Isaac Newton comes up with his three laws of mechanics, and we get…
There’s something about restarting my Mac on a …
ex program, en farm
The way in which a tree grows is often determined by their environment, and as a bonsai artist, I look to honor that environment, and the way in which that tree would grow in nature, when determining how to shape and style a bonsai.
Paper: This blog post has been expanded into a full paper: Scalable and Personalized Oral Assessments Using Voice AI (Panos Ipeirotis and...
A bunch of reasons to write code in 2026
Why the poorest people in the world spend fortunes burying their dead
Soon after I launched this blog in February 2005, I signed up for Google AdSense. My goal was to make a little money and learn about the industry from the inside. In particular, if I was going to cover the...
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And…
(Yes, but.)
Your brain needs to offload just as badly as your butt does. I know it sounds boring to sit in there, alone, naked from the waist down, staring at the wal...
There is a video by Gamers Nexus making the rounds that makes me really angry. It reports about LG's latest practise to add blatant spyware to a monitor. Or to be precise to the *software* application associated with that monitor. The icing is that Windows apparently automatically downloads this software by default…
Bob Cringely died on Oct 3, 2026
I would like you to know that we passengers are trying our best. To you, this place makes sense -- you come here every day. You speak the lingo. You kno...
