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Rules of good social skills (2025)
Yesterday, I timeboxed 45 minutes to write down every single rule of good social skills I could come up with, wrote a tweet thread, then it went somewhat viral !
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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 662 posts.
542
In Memoriam: John W. Addison, my PhD advisor
John Addison (1930–2025) died March 7, 2025, at the age of 95. He was my PhD advisor at UC Berkeley, and I count myself extraordinarily lucky to have worked under his guidance. My condolences go ou…
543
Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
I just finished Oliver Sacks’ excellent Everything in Its Place. In it, he mentioned as an aside that the Ginkgo biloba tree is hundreds of millions of years old, and its phenotype has been practically frozen since then – a living fossil.
544
Warm up your MacBook (2019)
Who else hates putting their hands on an icy metal laptop after it's been riding outside in your cold backpack? Here's a one-line solution.
545
What is happening to writing? Cognitive debt, Claude Code, the space around AI
"Cognitive debt," Claude Code, and the negative space around AI
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I don't enjoy the Internet any more
The pale is growing
547
I switched from Mac to a Lenovo Chromebook
Documenting my journey switching away from Mac to a Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14
548
What I did at Recurse Center
I spent the summer at Recurse Center, a programming retreat in Brooklyn, at the recommendation of my friend Cory. These are some things I did there.
549
Withnail's Coat and I
He may have had tailoring from Hawkes of Savile Row, but Withnail’s coat has a more complicated history.
550
A Crisis comes to Wordle: Reusing old words
A few days ago, The new York Times (owner of Wordle) announced that from 2 February it would start reusing some words from previous years. Their announcem...
551
Everyone's Packing Up
I see a lot of posts about people leaving platforms. This one about leaving Reddit, this one about leaving WordPress, and a bunch of others about leaving Dis...
552
A bug which affected only left handed users
Verily, some of our brethren (and sistren) be afflicted with a sinister disposition. While the righteous scroll using the thumb of their right hand - as is good and proper - an accurs'd minority swing the other way. Look, you try writing an interesting bug report without sounding like a clanker, OK! I try to optimise…
553
The F Word
Back in 2005, when I first joined the SUNY Buffalo CSE department, the department secretary was a wonderful lady named Joann, who was over 6...
554
French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
A complete explanation of how e, è, é, ê, and ë are used in French, with rules, examples and pronunciation.
555
Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers
The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic. I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal. I have a spicily optimistic take: I think there's a huge opportunity for junior engineers.
556
Good developers learn to program. Most courses teach a language
A bootcamp can teach you the syntax of a language in six weeks. The part that takes a decade is everything else: where the seams go, where the data flows, which decisions you are stuck with for the life of the codebase. This is a senior developer's argument for what learners should actually be looking for, after…
557
Novellas with Groff
Don't even think about it: I won't publish this. Nor send it to you privately, which is mostly the same as publishing it.
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I Remain a Skeptic
I still do not use LLMs for anything I actually care about. There are a lot of reasons I could give: environmental, social, political. I could talk about ecosystem lock-in, learned dependence, self-soverignty, philosophical concerns, the intentional dismantling of labour bargaining power, and more. But before all of…
560
Don't Subscribe So Casually
Or, why your AI subscription is worth analyzing
561
Online Friends Are Real Friends
A few days ago I booked my flights to not only attend a professional event, but also visit and stay with one of my best friends next month. This will be the ...
562
Using ThinkPad T480 as a mobile phone
A collection of Maroš Grego's works.
563
Understanding the rationale behind a rule when trying to circumvent it
I mean, technically I didn't do it.
564
Smart people don't think others are stupid (2012)
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
565
I dream of quieter computing
A quick note about future of computing and indieweb. It's about a 2 minute read.
566
Tracking Costco gas prices
I reverse-engineered Costco's gas price API and built a live tracker covering every US warehouse, right as a Strait of Hormuz scare sent fuel prices climbing.
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Against Usefulness
In a Brooklyn warehouse, a man handed me a piece of paper that was a running computer program.
569
A Year of 3D Printing
If you'd asked me a few years back if I thought I'd buy a 3D printer, I would have said no. My experience of 3D printers back when I was in college was that they were very slow, expensive, frequently failed mid-print, and needed constant calibration...
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