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Dear people who work at the airport
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...
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 662 posts.
362
Bus travel from Lima to Rio de Janeiro
In 2025, I traveled by bus in South America, starting in Lima, Peru and ending in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Here are some details for anyone interested in doing the same.
363
You don't have to
"In the year 5555, your arms are hangin' limp at your sides, your legs got nothing to do, some machine doin' that for you." Zager and Evans sang these words in 1969. Now, thirty-five centuries ahead of schedule, it's never been easier to tell the world "I didn't care about this and I don't care about you."
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Greg Brockman interview [video]
The AI race, the future of AGI, and the inside story of OpenAI. Greg Brockman is the co-founder and President of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and GPT-5. He was the first engineer at Stripe before leaving in 2015 to help start OpenAI. In this rare conversation, Greg goes inside the moments that built, and nearly …
365
Take better notes, by hand
Researching a topic is hard, because not only are you trying to puzzle together the causes and effects of a given problem or historical series of events, you're also looking out carefully for leads and new threads to pull. Falling down rabbit holes is common—and encouraged—but eventually you need to pull yourself back…
366
Here be monsters: What do you still need to know when agents do the work?
AI agents write code faster than anyone can read it. What engineers still need: fundamentals, breadth, and the willingness to dive in when it breaks.
367
If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?
Yesterday, I received this email as a response to You Can't Vibe Code Love. It's such a remarkable and powerful statement that I asked permission to share it here, in its entirety, with personal information redacted: Hey Jeff, Hope you and your family are doing well. Just jogging
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Pre-2022 Books
I noticed that I seem to, subconsciously, gravitate towards books published on or before 2022, and somewhat discount books published after, especially from authors I haven’t heard of.
369
Halt and Catch Fire
I have never watched the AMC show Halt and Catch Fire, and for a long time I only knew the title, but nothing about the show. Something about it always reminded...
370
My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood
In Which I go into Great Detail About Digitizing Video8 and Learn My Grandmama Lived With a Prostitute
371
Are two heads better than one?
A look at the surprising probabilities behind a simple coin flipping game
372
Introduction to Obsidian
An introduction to Obsidian. Why you should use it, how to keep it simple, and how you can use it.
373
The Harness Is the Thing
Models are commodifying. The harness - skills, extensions, a scriptable app - is where the work and the leverage now live.
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Networking and the Internet, from First Principles
How electricity, light, and radio move data across independently operated networks.
377
Punk, or why I don't stream anymore
If you’re the sun, I’m a black hole – The Stephen Hawking, Say Anything
378
Why are we even doing all this?
[This is a guest post by Rikab Gambhir. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] First, they came for the artists, and I did not speak out…
379
My Favourite Laptop
I’m not a big owner of things, but the best laptop I’ve ever owned is a roughed-up 2015 Thinkpad X250.
380
There's no point at which turning your brain off will work
In early 2025, I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs 1 . They would have an LLM take an action (summarize text, write some code, etc.), and just assume that it worked 2 . This generally didn't work in early 2025 and the result was often quite silly.
381
A love letter to flashcards
A personal reflection on how spaced repetition and hand crafted flashcards helps me to keep understanding alive
382
Maybe comments should explain 'what' (2017)
People say “Comments should explain why, not what.” I feel like starting a flame war today so I’m going to argue that comments should explain ‘what’ too. Please don’t use this as justification to write bad code, okay? Okay. First of all, why shouldn’t comments explain ‘what’? If you need comments to explain what’s…
383
Alternate clock designs and time systems
A day has 24 hours in it. That's 1,440 minutes or 86,400 seconds. If you wonder why Americans don't understand the need for using the metric system then ask yourself why you use this inconsistent time measurement system.
384
Stop eating Lady Gaga's Oreos
OR: The Great Switcheroo
385
MUNI Heritage Weekend in San Francisco
I went to San Francisco for Muni Heritage Weekend 2026! I stood by the tracks for three hours with my line scan camera, scanning trams.
386
How Japanese Dried Bonito Is Made
This workshop founded in 1882 still makes dried bonito like they did back in the Edo period. How katsuobushi — Japanese dried bonito, said to be the world’s har
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How I use Obsidian (2023)
My personal Obsidian vault template. A bottom-up approach to note-taking and organizing things I am interested in.
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Work with the garage door up (2024)
One of my favorite ways that creative people communicate is by “working with their garage door up,” to riff on a passage from Robin Sloan (below). This is the opposite of the Twitter account which mostly posts announcements of finished work: it’s Screenshot Saturday ; it’s giving a lecture about the problems you’re…
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Why Sal Khan't: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling
Two pieces crossed my feed recently, both about Sal Khan and the AI tutoring revolution that wasn’t. The first was Matt Barnum’s reported piece in Chalkbeat, where Khan himself acknowledged that…