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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,926 posts.
I grew up in Amsterdam, which is a pretty rough town by Dutch Standards. As a kid there are all kinds of temptations and peer-pressure to join in in bad stuff is something that is hard to escape. But somehow that never was a big factor for me, computers and electronics kept me fascinated for long enough that none of…
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
Link to: https://tidbits.com/2025/12/17/compromised-apple-gift-card-leads-to-apple-account-lockout/
Most people have an extremely incorrect perception about waste disposal and recycling. Here’s the reality.
“To flash conviction on the mind.”
In his wonderful book The Evolution of Useful Things, the author and civil engineer Henry Petroski shares one of the most famous case studies in the history of design: Before it was destroyed by fi…
A story about Disneyland's Space Mountain and a 10-year-old inventor.
After spending part of the last 12 months travelling in Europe I'm now settling down around Paris and I need to adapt my multi-screens setup. You probably have seen an ads for the altwork desk a $7000 desk that let you work laying down. Spending a big part of my …
How Bill Watterson Stuck to His Guns — and Vanished
tl;dr: After two weeks of use, I returned my 2016 13" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and bought one with Function Keys instead. Read on for detailed Battery stress tests, performance tests, and an exploration of how Apple's botched this year's Pro lineup. I've owned almost every generation of Mac desktop and laptop…
Not long ago one of our programmers just lost it and he lost it good. He walked into the manager’s office and began screaming strange things...
In the aggressive pursuit of expanding ad revenue, Apple is gambling with one of its core values: great products.
What happens when you forget your password or loose your phone? What Google wants to know to validate your identity?
When I started my ham life as KK6VSI in August of 2015, I wish I could have had the information I'm about to lay out here. Of course, most of the equipment didn't yet exist. So another way of looking at it is that my entry into amateur radio was perfectly timed for my generation's Golden Age of Ham Radio.
dickover — a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of…
In 2000, Douglas Adams made an interesting observation that I keep returning to. A user on Slashdot named “FascDot Killed My Pr” had asked the following question (where HGttG = Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy): Comedy….or Tragedy? First, a big thank-you. You’ve made a lasting contribution to “our” culture (or should…
Figuring out how to lean in to my thinking style
setting up a microhydro installation
I caught the chess bug as a college student, twenty-one years old, and it’s become my favorite way to unwind since then, as I’m now working at VisioStack and starting a master’s i…
It’s possibly the best advice for managers I've given so …
(As with anything else I write about parenting, this is mostly just my observations with my own two kids and may not generalize as well as I think it does.) A few weeks ago I wrote about why I think it's valuable for parents to be predictable. I was mostly describing an end state, though, and reasons why it's a good…
A lot of people want to replicate YC in some other industry or some other place or with some other strategy. In general, people seem to assume that: 1) although there was some degree of mystery or...
Allow me to introduce you to one of the largest population groups in India, as recognized by the constitution of India: Other Backward Classes ( OBC Category ). OBCs are estimated to comprise 40-45% of India's population, therefore, about 500 million people belong to OBC category. In other words, 1 in 16 people in the…
