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Dispatches from the farm upstate
Middle-aged computer expert opts to escape civilization, offers dubious life advice.
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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,939 posts.
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Sending Emails to Myself
In April, I wrote operatornotify.py , a module which allows my programs to notify me of important information or errors. I was immediately very proud of it. It felt awesome to get so much impact out of a sub-100 line module as I went around hooking it up to my existing programs and getting the tracebacks from my…
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Putting Victimhood Behind You
The primary goal of this site is to help people put victimhood behind them and craft a future of their choosing. "Living well is the best re...
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Lemonade Stand
This article was discussed on Hacker News. Introduction This was a fun nostalgia trip. But it ended up being an attempt to collect and preserve some retro computing history as well… and I als…
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Alien Artefacts
The purpose of this blog post is to introduce the concept of alien artefacts 1 , a subcategory of legacy code. I use the term to describe particularly complicated and important pieces of software written by very smart engineers that are no longer working for the company—and thus not available to support it. The…
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Why does the Zune HD have the message “For our Princess” inside of the case?
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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Against Usefulness
In a Brooklyn warehouse, a man handed me a piece of paper that was a running computer program.
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Printing and binding your own books and manuals (2003)
Despite the wealth of on-screen documentation available, like many people I still feel the need to print things out for reference or study. For most people, printing out a manual means putting up with a bunch of A4 or Letter-sized pages with a staple through the corner, which doesn't seem much good to me. Instead I…
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An almost perfect real-world hack
Almost immediately after we bought our house I received a letter in the mail. The local school district was appealing the tax assessment of my house. The issue in question was the value of my property in 2002 (don’t ask, it’s a long story, and a silly law). My property tax is some percentage of the 2002 value of my…
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How I Side Project
This post started out as a long-form response to this tweet by Raj Kunkolienkar:
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Vim Koans
These koans have been independently translated into Chinese (archived) , thanks to Wanzhang Sheng, and into Spanish (archived) , thanks to Daniel Campoverde Carrión.
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Metaphors We Believe By
In the past, gods and demons allowed us to talk about phenomena that we didn’t fully understand. During the Enlightenment, we tried to kill them and explain everything in reductionist scientific terms. But it feels to me like we’ve come full circle. We’re back to using oversimplified metaphors to wrap our minds around…
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I would like closure, but I'll take honesty
The New York Times is special.
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Doing what you love when the money won’t follow
I have frequently been critical of the advice given by baby boomers to “do what you love and the money will follow”. After the hard experience of my generation and the ones following it…
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Algernon's Law
Why most supplements fail: IQ improvement skepticism, Yudkowsky & Bostrom’s heuristics, nootropics
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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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The advantages of programming on a small netbook
Most software developers prefer to work on "fast" computers, and I am normally one of them. Many of my tools work best with lots of memory, ...
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