Topics /

Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,929 posts.

Any year
2074

No more XS4ALL is unthinkable

They are the example of how it should be, the Dutch ISP called XS4ALL. They were bought in '98 by the former state-owned KPN, but continued to operate independently. Born from a group of hackers and the first ISP in the Netherlands, today they are still the example that we measure other ISPs by.

2091

Cleaning My MacBook After 16800 Hours of Use

I estimated that I had used my mac for approximately 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, 48 weeks a year, for 7 years straight, for a total for whopping 16800 hours. I have written the first versions of most of the software components of my startup using this computer. And all this time, this machine worked without a…

2092

Making peace with your unlived dreams (2023)

I will never be a great snowboarder. For various genetic and non-genetic reasons, my knees are barely capable of surviving a three-hour hike, let alone the landing after a 1080. In fact, I’ll probably never be a snowboarder at all, given my orthopedist told me to stay away from anything that’s heavy on the knees, […]

2093

How to Get Good at Chess, Fast

Edit: This article on chess improvement was unexpectedly popular, reaching #2 on Hacker News and being linked to on LifeHacker. Thanks for your patience as I work through all the comments and emails I receive. There are many misconceptions about rapid chess improvement. In this post I’m going to lay out a simple but…

2098

Dangerous Gift

A friend of mine pinged me online, said “Hey, remember that thing we were talking about doing a couple years ago? I still have one of the domain names, gonna let it go unless you want it.”