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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 662 posts.
For this year's "I love Free Software Day" I would like to thank the maintainers of Free Software documentation, and here especially the maintainers of the ArchWiki. Maintainers in general, and maintainers of documentation most of the time get way too little recognition for their contributions to...
When I was going through YC, I didn’t mention my seven month old daughter to anyone. Now a few years later I have two kids, a dog and a very packed schedule. My kids are the best thing in my life. For years, my work was my life. Now my life competes with my work.
An accessible deep dive into the science (⏱️ 30 min read)
A flickering fireplace, a softly lit garden, and a smart home the whole family finally enjoys.
For various reasons, I have decided to move as many services and subscriptions as possible from non-EU countries to the EU or to switch to European service providers. The reasons for this are the current global political situation and improved data protection. I don’t want to go into the first point any further for…
I spent ages 14-16 in a maximum-security juvenile prison, became a felon at 19, lost almost everything to addiction, and later rebuilt my life through software, open source, and a few people who took a chance on me. This is the condensed story, written for anyone wondering whether they have a future.
Last year, I visited my grandmother's house for the first time after the pandemic and came across a cupboard full of loose old photos. I counted 1,351 of them spanning all the way from my grandparents in their early 20s, my mom as a baby, to me in middle school, just around the time when we got our first smartphone…
AI took the last of the wind out of my Open Source sails. I wish you all the best!
OR: an apology to my English teachers
Agents write units of changes that look good in isolation. They are consistent with themselves and your prompt. But respect for the whole, there is not.
On friction, patience, and planting trees.
I still love developing but the shifts that AI have brought are tectonic and are forcing me to re-evaluate my own relationship to building things
When I moved to a new apartment with my family, the cable company we were used to wasn't available. We had to settle for Dish Network. I wasn't too happy about making that switch, but something on the
The meme will no longer be a dream.
LLMs are used for any things. Learning new things is one of the top use cases.
You gather your most expensive people into a room to make your most important decisions. Then, somewhere in the second hour, the room quietly gets worse at making them. Not the people. The room.
The act of pumping immense, disproportionate resources into a previously casual or complex and layered activity to forcefully extract and squeeze out the purest, most concentrated dopamine hit
I didn’t ask for this and neither did you. I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some…
The internet’s default answer to “why is the sky blue?” is “Rayleigh scattering”. And that’s not wrong, but it’s also not very useful.
Writing advice: some nonfiction fails because it opens with background instead of a hook—readers leave before reaching the good material. Find the single anomaly or question that makes your topic interesting, lead with that, and let the background follow once you’ve earned attention.
I’ve been a longtime Claude Code user, ever since it became available in the Claude Pro subscription plan over a year ago. I remember the first time I used it, feeling giddy as it spat out messy Python code for whatever random weekend project I was working on, all from a single prompt. I’m certain that in a few years…
Hunting timeless insights into humans and software and helping others on the way.
In this essay, Carson Gross discusses his advice to young people interested in computer science worried about the future given the advancements in AI.
If you’re willing to use AI-generated images, how do I know the text isn’t AI-generated?
I’m feeling it right now. I had to set a timer for 15 minute on my computer and block all distractions to write this. If I didn’t force myself to focus I would easily get distracted by something after few minutes. Even when I’m doing things that I’ve been waiting to do it, I still feel the urge to do something else. I…
Speaking of being on the internet and finding things that make you go, “Hey! It’s not just me!” I scrolled across this skeet from Tyler Gaw : I just dug to the…
Two rules keep an LLM from pasteurizing your writing: never take a word it suggests, and never let it encourage you. Then hand it all the tedious work.
Looking foolish is underrated.
What is now known as the Slug Algorithm for rendering fonts directly from Bézier curves on the GPU was developed in the Fall of 2016, so this year marks a full decade since its inception. I published a paper in JCGT about the technique in the middle of 2017, and my company sold the first license for version 1.0 of the…
