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A geek meets the Ikea Lillabo Train Set
As further proof of my unsuitability to be a child minder (see previous post ) I found myself playing with an Ikea LILLABO 20-piece basic se...
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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,937 posts.
4982
A case for using punctuation in Slack
Or, a case for using punctuation in Slack
4983
Arguing from compassion (2021)
For example, that universal basic income (UBI) could ameliorate the loss of jobs due to automation, a straw man would be, “So you want people to sit at home all day and collect free money?” Recently, the term has become a cudgel in the culture wars.
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Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
Provision of maintenance procedures and tools is at the heart of software engineering, but not in macOS.
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Train Travel in the UK: A Foreigner’s Perspective
Although British people love to complain about the state of their railways, my impressions about train travel in the UK were mostly positive.
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Writing code doesn't mix well with oration
Why writing code live on stage is a bad idea, and what to do instead.
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"A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" Simulated by GPT-4
A short simulation of Neal Stephenson's Illustrated Primer using GPT-4 and DALL·E 3.
4990
Reversing the effects of long programming sessions
Programming for long periods is like walking a high tight rope for a really, really long period of time, or at least I imagine it is... ...
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4992
More damaging evidence on open plan offices
Hondatoto merupakan salah satu website terapresiasi penyandang 10 situs lotto terpercaya yang akan menjadi solusi terbaik mendapatkan cuan. Main togel toto dengan pasaran internasional secara online dengan menggunakan jasa agen togel resmi Honda toto yang memiliki metode pembayaran termudah.
4993
Forget Twitter threads and write a blog post instead (2021)
All of the kool kids in Twitter land seem to be jumping on the bandwagon of a very annoying craze. Twitter threads. Please stop; write a blog post instead
4994
Why is everybody knitting chickens?
A couple years ago, my wife began knitting. And when she takes an interest in something, she goes all in. She’s a perfectionist about learning a new craft, so in a short amount of time, she’s gotten pretty damn good. I can’t even pretend to know anything
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4996
Cross Views
Your camera has the ability to take three dimensional photos. Your screen has the ability to display three dimensional photos. You’ve probably never used either.
4997
The local timeline is the key to enjoying Mastodon
I'm sure you have already heard about Mastodon, typically marketed as a Twitter alternative. I will try to convince you that the word alternative doesn't mean here what you think it means, and why you may be using Mastodon wrong if you find it bori
4998
Literate programming is much more than just commenting code
Most programmers haven’t heard of literate programming , and the few that have tend to think it means writing a lot of comments around your code. However, simply explaining code with prose, does not constitute literate programming. Consider the following quote from it’s inventor:
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How much oranger do red orange bags make oranges look?
Look at this orange: Now look at this orange: It’s the same orange. But, look how much more orange it looks with the red mesh on top of it: If you buy bags of oranges (at least at many places in the US), they frequently come in this red mesh bag. This bag makes the oranges look more orange. Oranger. Here’s what that…
5001
Hacking strength: Gaining muscle with least resistance
Then, after realizing I was too weak to lift my son and his wheelchair in and out of the car, I spent just over a year gaining strength and muscle.
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Don’t Fly During Ramadan (2013)
A couple of weeks ago, I tried to fly from New York (JFK) to Los Angeles on JetBlue. I was racially profiled, detained, and interrogated for hours.
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More Good Programming Quotes (2016)
In my previous post, The Wisdom of Programming Quotes, I called out some quotes that look good on the surface, but turn out to promote the wrong ideas about software development. I have also posted…
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Create a positive feedback loop to become motivated
Do you struggle with enjoying your work? Do you struggle with going to the gym regularly?
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Personal Finance Lessons for Technology Professionals
> Patience. Frugality. Sacrifice. When you boil it down, what do those three things have in common? Those are choices. Money is not peace of mind. Money’s not happiness. Money is, at its essence, that measure of a man’s choices. This is part of the opening monologue of the
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John Varley has died
. John Varley died two days ago on December 10, 2025. A great many will mourn him as a science fiction writer whose work they enjoyed. But...
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Reality is a Shared Hallucination (1997)
The artificial construction of reality was to play a key role in the new form of global intelligence which would soon emerge among human beings. If the group brain's "psyche" were a beach with shifting dunes and hollows, individual perception would be that beach's grains of sand. However this image has a hidden snag …
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Baking with machine learning (2020)
Like many people, I’ve been entertaining myself at home by baking a ton. I’ve gotten pretty good at following recipes, but I decided I wanted to take things one step further and understand the science behind what differentiates a cake from a bread or a cookie. I also like machine learning so I thought: what if I could…