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Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 668 posts.

2025
662

You Want Technology with Warts

I normally skip presentations because I prefer reading, but Building the Hundred-Year Web Service (YouTube) was worth the time. 1 1 Note that despite “htmx” featuring in the title, very little of the presentation is actually about htmx. It is about choosing and using technology in such a way that it won’t require…

664

Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

We always thought of the Macintosh as a fast computer, since its 68000 microprocessor was effectively 10 times faster than an Apple II, but our Achilles heel was the floppy disk. We had limited RAM, so it was often necessary to load data from the floppy, but there we were no faster than an Apple II. Once we had real…

665

The Chaos (1922)

This is a classic English poem containing about 800 of the worst irregularities in English spelling and pronunciation. Will Snellen wrote a PDF version using the phonetic alphabet . You can hear some of it pronounced mostly correctly in videos here:

667

As I remember London

As soon as I was old enough to travel on my own, London was where I wanted to go. Compared to Copenhagen at the time, there was something so majestic about Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, and even the Tube around the turn of the millenium. Not just because their capital is twice as old as ours, but because it endured twice…