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Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown
I wrote up my experience building a backyard office because I wish I had come across more articles like this when planning my build. I hope this post helps you
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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 662 posts.
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Good sleep, good learning, good life (2012)
The good educator insists on exercise, play, and plentiful sleep: "the great cordial of nature."
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The real cost of owning a home
Owning a home costs a lot more than just the mortgage. Here are the hidden costs to consider when deciding whether to buy or rent.
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Lines of code got a better publicist
A case against measuring AI-assisted engineering by code volume and other vanity metrics instead of outcomes.
156
Doomscrolling ourselves to death
James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages
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My weird new hobby: Wandering around Tokyo on Google Maps
My weird hobby lately is just wandering around Street View and zooming in on random stuff. Today I found a 350Z that shows up parked in the same Tokyo spot in every capture since 2009.
158
Someone on Torrent Sites Kept Fucking with My Sonarr
PLEASE stop putting skid malware on torrent sites as South Park episodes
159
Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?
For my piece on Catholic miracle apologetics , I read (correction: skimmed) a 25,000-word post by rationalist blogger Scott Alexander. My piece, which cited (but does not focus on) his, ended up being a cool 2,700 words. I don't think it would benefit from being longer, and it was the result of me cutting around 70%…
160
I saw your HN comment
I used to love getting emails from people in response to things I’ve written online, blog posts or Hacker News comments, but in the last 2 years it’s changed from mostly signal to mostly noise. I’ve …
161
I gave Opus 5.5 one prompt and six hours to visualize Invisible Cities
Claude Opus 5.5 vs GPT-6 Astra one-shot Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino in Three.js: AI design, UX, data visualization and explorable explanations.
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Honda Civics and the Evil Valet
Status update, three years later
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The Art of Money Getting
P.T. Barnum was 70 years old when he turned his most popular lecture into this book in 1880. By then, he’d already built America’s most famous museum in New York, introduced General Tom Thumb to audiences, served as mayor of Bridgeport, gone broke from a disastrous investment in a Connecticut clock company, and clawed…
164
The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows
Without permission, a marketing agency republished the entirety of John Koenig's Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows book, replacing its art with AI slop and adding new AI words. Their unauthorized site now ranks higher than the real one everywhere.
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C Is Best (2025)
Since its inception on 2000-05-29, SQLite has been implemented in generic C. C was and continues to be the best language for implementing a software library like SQLite. There are no plans to recode SQLite in any other programming language at this time.
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I think I have LLM burnout
I didn't expect to get so tired of reading LLM output.
167
You can just say it
There is a weird collection of arguments for appraising the value of humans and their creative artifacts. It usually goes something like this: In the age of AI, we should still prefer humans in certain roles because AI could never perform the tasks required for that role. Or, a human can at least do it better. Or…
168
Music Theory for Programmers
I can't play an instrument, so I worked out music theory in JavaScript instead. Twelve notes, scales and chords, derived from scratch with code you can hear.
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How to Exist
Here’s an experiment for a true daredevil. Sit there for a three minutes, following two rules:
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U+237C ⍼ Is Azimuth
One year ago, on 28 February 2025, Wikipedia user Moyogo updated the page for Angzarr with a citation to the type foundry H. Berthold AG’s 1950 symbol catalogue listing ⍼ as Azimut, Richtungswinkel , or “azimuth”, “direction angle”. Mystery solved!
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Why vampires live forever
The modern longevity movement's obsession with blood transfusions makes perfect sense — if you accept that Peter Thiel and Bryan Johnson are vampires.
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2025 Letter
Corgis, compute, Cold War; Ecclesiastes; ties; Stendhal; humor; Pascal's Wager; deep infrastructure; Germanic obedience; Texas State Fair
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Damn fine tiny cafe
I love them miniatures. It started off with Rolife series, where the first hit had come from a [[https://sandyuraz.com/blogs/mini-libra...
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Em dashes are amazing
An ode to a punctuation mark
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The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist
A fictitious Sean Byrne ended up on a U.S. government restricted-party list. Sixteen years later, Apple, Nasdaq and others have mistaken me for him.
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Raising money fucked me up
My reflections on raising money for Skald Labs
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The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein
Last night, I was taken aback to discover that my name appears in the Epstein Files, in 26 different documents. This is despite the fact that I met Jeffrey Epstein a grand total of zero times, and …
178
The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription
Except for the SaaS, almost none of this is useful and I don't want to maintain any of it. I accidentally run a news outlet which is surely a liability. Sure, it has helped me "learn AI tooling" and I use many of these tools, but I didn't need them. I can't afford to maintain any of them, not in terms of time…
179
A4 Paper Stories
I sometimes resort to a rather common measuring technique that is neither fast, nor accurate, nor recommended by any standards body and yet it hasn't failed me whenever I have had to use it. I will describe it here, though calling it a technique might be overselling it. Please do not use it for installing kitchen…
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I am happier writing code by hand
I felt the familiar feeling of depression and lethargy creep in while my eyes darted from watching claude-code work and my phone. “What’s the point of it all?” I thought, LLMs can generate decent-ish and correct-ish looking code while I have more time to do what? doomscroll? This was the third time I gave claude-code…