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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,940 posts.
My heart was racing. My palms sweating. I was going to be fired.\nPerformance reviews had just ended, and it was time to meet my manager and be told my results. Except I knew what it would say. How else do you rate a programmer who doesn’t code?
A stiff drink is recommended
Update 6/22… It’s 12 years later and I just recently was able to get KhanAcademy.net and KhanAcademy.us to the folks at Khan Academy! It’s great to be able to support my favorite non-profits in a meaningful way. If you’re into domains and watching the drop, add a few of your favorite non-profits to your monitor list…
On January 12th, 2012 I went to Airbnb to give a talk about Storm at their tech talk series. It wa...
A real-world one-way function: Alice and Bob procure the same edition of the white pages book for a particular town, say Cambridge. For each letter Alice wants to encrypt, she finds a person in the book whose last name starts with this letter and uses his/her phone number as the encryption of that letter. To decrypt…
How I sold my tiny online store builder One Item Store, and how I think anyone can sell their tiny projects online.
For the first time, I won a major raffle at a recent conference. However, I had to give the prize back since it was a beer dispenser and I don’t drink. If your reaction after reading the last line was “Why don’t you drink?” or “Most of us do and it’s your choice that you missed out.”, then this blog is for you. I’m…
I saw this bouncing around Facebook, and I would like to endorse the underlying philosophy:
For two years I suffered from severe hand, wrist, and forearm pain while typing. After spending a lot of money on world-class medical professionals and ergonomic products but seeing poor results, I was ultimately able to cure all my pain by reading The Mindbody Prescription (TMP). Now I can type for as long as I want…
When Apple stops issuing security updates for older iPhones, they become unsafe to use. But exactly how long can you safely keep using an old iPhone, and when should you upgrade?
How to vote back home while you're in Antarctica!
I waited years for someone to invest in my career. Nobody came.
You're reading this, so I'll assume your English is pretty good. What's wrong with these phrases? Do you have a logical reason for why they sound strange? Or…
“Many of us are grappling with OpenAI’s announcement on 6 October. We feel that it is useful to have an updating snapshot of the community’s gut feeling.”
Author's note: I wrote this in March 2023, but just published in October 2025. I held back from publishing this originally for fear that I was being sensationalist. But with the launch of Sora 2, I couldn't not share these thoughts. I only regret I didn't publish it 2 years ago.
There’s a certain kind of person who’s becoming extinct. You’ve probably met one. Maybe you are one. Someone who actually understood the tools they used. Someone who could sit down at an unfamiliar system, poke at it for twenty minutes, and have a working mental model of what it was doing and why. Someone who read…
Misc thoughts, memories, proto-essays, musings, etc.
Damn! Remember when these buns had sesame seeds?
If creators of documentation are prepared to sacrifice its human purpose in order that LLMs can more effectively slurp it up and regurgitate it on demand, then they have meekly accepted values that more properly belong in a dystopian horror story.
At first, I thought I was addicted to internet forums. Then Facebook appeared and soon after I discovered Reddit, Hacker News, 9GAG, Instagram and other form...
Whenever I write about a topic that upsets me, I calm myself by illustrating it with royalty-free, reassuring stock photos. "People are...
A big change that I’ve realised during undergrad is that engineering doesn’t feel ‘magical’ anymore.
Has someone asked you to do something recently that you know you don’t have time to do but felt like you needed to do anyway? Or has someone tried to get you to help with something and impres…
Max Hawkins is nomadic artist and software engineer.
