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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 662 posts.
I’ve been thinking about where I stand in respect to the current state of the industry. This is more of a journal note than a post, apologies for that. I usually leave this stuff private, but I thought I’d post this as a trial in case someone relates to this experience and feels less alone. All opinions are my own.
I've been tracking my finances using Beancount in plain text files for 10 years. Here are the numbers, the workflow, and why I believe plaintext accounting will outlive any app.
Yesterday, the title The End of Education by Neil Postman called to me from my bookshelf, whispering that it might be the right book at the right time. It was. Published in 1995, it was surprisingly appropriate balm for the soul of a confused programmer and soon-to-be father.
Many engineers should be doing less work. I don’t necessarily mean producing less code or fewer changes, but literally working fewer hours in the day. When they…
An atlas of the vibrance of the real world
Claude will remain ad-free. We explain why advertising incentives are incompatible with a helpful AI assistant.
In June 2008 Apple announced Mac OS X Snow Leopard, proudly boasting that it would have "no new features". Instead of piling on new things, Snow Leopard aimed to build on the success of its predecessor, Leopard, opting to focus on under-the-hood performance and stability improvements throughout the system.
...so I vibe-coded a tool for finding more of them
'Unraveling AI's 'Knitting Bullshit'
I’m obsessed with the craft of writing. I write every day, I read about the craft often, and in my...
Since Android is becoming increasingly more locked down and slopped, I'm jumping ship.
In May of 2023, Google introduced “AI overviews” into their search engine.^1] This followed years of decisions leading to worse search quality and the consum...
In his classic Programming Perl — affectionately known to a generation of technologists as "the Camel Book" — Larry Wall famously wrote of the three virtues of a programmer as laziness, impatience, and hubris:
Can ChatGPT replace translators? A freelance translator shares a funny Ottawa story about AI translation, professional judgment and why human expertise still matters.
You can learn new things. Pixel art, touch typing, 3d modelling, music, calligraphy, wood working, knitting, a language. Whatever is practical and calls to you, you can learn. In the long term, learning new things is fun and makes life richer in ways you can’t even imagine, and it’s a time investment that will pay…
Years ago, I watched a video where guitar teacher Justin Sandercoe explained a way to get better at guitar. It has changed my playing, and it might change yours, too. This isn’t my idea; it’s Justin’s. You should watch his video and visit his website. Why am I writing about it, then? Because I think it’s an invaluable…
I have a little pet theory that software drives people insane. Not in the "wash your hands every thirty minutes like Howard Hughes" kind of way, but more ...
Museum APIs and the art that hasn't been viewed much.
On a catchup call, I told my friend Nick Wignall how someone had trained an AI model to write blog posts in my style. It was a pure research exercise on their part. The idea was to train the tool on my past work, then give it the headlines and opening paragraphs of my 2025 […]
Why reasonable explanations are one of the easiest ways to avoid changing anything.
John Gruber writes about those annoying popups every website seems to have now and while he does a great job tearing into these ubiquitous, user-hostile…
A 50-year comparison of Billboard’s top songs shows how recorded music became machine-perfect.
In middle school I could not get through long passages no matter how hard I tried. I would read an entire page and find that nothing had reg...
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We knew this day would come. Some of us have known for decades, have been writing and pontificating about this since Ken Jennings lost at Jeopardy and Kasparov lost at chess. The writing was on the wall, and now the writing is everywhere. Literally. Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans — at […]
In early February 2011 Egypt was in the middle of a political revolution. One morning, everyone's phones suddenly pinged with an alert. The Armed Forces asks Egypt's honest and loyal men to confront the traitors and criminals and protect our people and honour and our precious Egypt. A series of messages arrived all…
DHH, the creator of the Ruby on Rails framework, decided to rewrite Campfire Once from Ruby on Rails to Rust. Or rather ask a clanker to do it for him, as he can't stand reading or writing the Rust code himself. After that he added rewrites in other languages , like Elixir and Go.
