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Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,926 posts.

Any year
871

Rejection Letter

I'd like to apologize in advance, but after consulting with my colleagues in other departments at Reality Publishing Corporation, I'm afraid we can't publish your book, "Zero Day: The story of MS17-010", as things stand. However, I'd like to add that it was a gripping read, very well written, and we hope to see more…

878

At

I recently appeared with John Gruber on The Talk Show. During the episode, the following exchange took place: @gruber: “How do you pronounce the ‘at’ symbol?” @chockenberry: “At” @gruber: “Right” Another @thetalkshow gem. — Jim Lipsey (@Jim_Lipsey) March 24, 2014 When it comes to naming characters, the Unicode…

879

No Salt

This is by my brother, Sam. I arrived to Arizona late Saturday, after learning that my brother has only a few days left before cancer ends him. Jake’s wife, Bess, confessed that she had neither the…

883

De-Brainrot Vacations

– Some cows in the fields. Brain Fog My brain is not the same as it was a few years ago. When I started working as a Software Engineer, everything was novel and mentally demanding. I notably remember how during my first professional months I’d come back home and just go straight to bed due to the mental exhaustion of…

886

Om

This is going to sound cornier than a bucket of Jiffy-Pop, but it is a profound irony that a man with such a big and beautiful figurative heart could have such a lousy literal one.

887

Accountability sinks

In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held dire...

888

Time to talk about my writerdeck

tldr: * I installed console-only Debian on an old laptop (no desktop OS at all) * I added some packages to make it work better for writing: * network-manager for connecting to hotspots while I'm away * kmscon for custom fonts and more than 16 colors in the tty * tmux for

897

MacBook Pro Insomnia

Update (01.08.2025): fixed broken link, typo, clarified problematic behaviour For a number of years now I have a MacBook Pro Silicon M1 Max. It worked beautifully. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, I started noticing that the battery drained over night when I left the notebook somewhere, not connected to power. This got…