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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,937 posts.
Revenge bedtime procrastination occurs when people delay going to sleep in order to feel in control of their life and schedule. This phenomenon is particularly associated with people who feel that they have little time for themselves during the day, for example due to their work schedule, so they delay sleep until…
Sometimes an insignificant interaction, or an excerpt from a book, is capable of provoking a life-changing insight. It might be an obvious lesson, but it feels epiphanic because it fits differently into my understanding of things. For instance…
Giving good career advice is hard. Maybe it’s because careers can look more alike than they really are. Two people can have the same title but what helps one...
There is no finish line. There is no winning, no losing.
I think the average person knows that programming isn’t quite the same as it is in the movies. But, sometimes, it is.
It takes less than an hour and $3.
This blog post is about the NAACL 2019 paper What makes a good conversation? How controllable attributes affect human judgments by Abigail See, Stephen Rolle...
I'm not smart enough for modern web development, and that's ok
Goodbye Ubuntu, Goodbye Snaps I missed two goals in the World Cup Finals because of this. It’s not the first time Snap has been a problem, but it’s most definitely the last straw. What happened? I was happily watching the second half of the Fifa World Cup Final, using “ShowMax” – a South African paid … Continue…
Anonymous career advice from people whose work we respect.
I generally find the numbers printed on pasta boxes for cooking time far too high: I'll set the timer for a minute below their low-end "al dente" time, and when I taste one it's already getting too mushy. I decided to run a small experiment to get a better sense of how cooked I like pasta. I decided to use Market…
A couple of months ago I received a present, a small book titled ‘Why we sleep’ by Matthew walker. It is an interesting book that takes you through the physiological and psychological effects of sleeping and the damage done by lack of sleep. I don’t necessarily subscribe to each and every bit in the book, there are…
[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…
I’m not a big owner of things, but the best laptop I’ve ever owned is a roughed-up 2015 Thinkpad X250.
I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people. But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time.
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.
Something that’s painfully understudied is how experts are more efficient than novices while achieving better results.
In which I wonder if my subconscious is a better developer than I am, as solutions seem to come to mind, bypassing the work I consciously put in.
A personal reflection on how spaced repetition and hand crafted flashcards helps me to keep understanding alive
If you follow security on the Internet, you may have seen articles warning you to “beware of public Wi-Fi networks" in cafes, airports, hotels, and other public places. But now, due to the widespread deployment of HTTPS encryption on most popular websites, advice to avoid public Wi-Fi is mostly out...
Or: why you should be a lizard
