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Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,925 posts.
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How I got here
My name is Preston Thorpe, I'm 31 years old and I've spent just under 10 years of my life in Prison (all for non-violent drug crimes.) I am currently incarcerated at Mountain View Correctional Facility in Charleston, Maine. More importantly, far more importantly, I am a software developer, open source maintainer…
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I spent two years launching tiny projects
Two years ago, frustrated with a long list of unfulfilled project ideas in my phone notes, I decided to give myself one week to try each idea out in its tiniest form.
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Burning out and quitting
I'm burnt out. If you're reading this, there's a strong chance you're burnt out too. We're about to have, uh, a moment, so brace yourself.
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We’re all just temporarily abled
That’s a quote from Cindy Li — “We're all just temporarily abled”. I first heard it in Sara’s course and it’s been on repeat in my mind ever since June 6th…
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Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it
I love to travel and for a long time I have been looking for the largest & most detailed world map available. ? I couldn't find the perfect one so I did it by myself. Here's what I've learned from working for more than 1,5 years on this.
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I am dying of squamous cell carcinoma, and potential treatments are out of reach
If you find this piece worthwhile, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding ongoing cancer care. Alex Tabarrok writes about how “when the FDA fails to approve a good drug, people die but the bo…
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Migrating to the EU
For various reasons, I have decided to move as many services and subscriptions as possible from non-EU countries to the EU or to switch to European service providers. The reasons for this are the current global political situation and improved data protection. I don’t want to go into the first point any further for…
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Building from zero after addiction, prison, and a felony
I spent ages 14-16 in a maximum-security juvenile prison, became a felon at 19, lost almost everything to addiction, and later rebuilt my life through software, open source, and a few people who took a chance on me. This is the condensed story, written for anyone wondering whether they have a future.
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Who Owns My Name?
Does my name belong to me? Does my face? What about my life? My story? Why is my name used to refer to events I had no hand in? I return to…
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My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll
I’m declaring defeat. Infinite scroll has won. There is an endless supply of interesting things to consume online, and there are teams and teams of very smart people working very hard to get me to keep watching. One more video means one more metric counter incrementing, one more engagement click, one more step towards…
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Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
Instead of doom-scrolling through my phone in the morning, I built an alternative with a Raspberry Pi, a dot matrix printer, and some PHP.
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Using Anki to remember what you read
Imagine this:
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Still alive
You just keep on trying till you run out of cake
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Au Revoir
Docker is a founding member of the Blueprint Alliance, a 12-company reference architecture for securing AI agents, built around four governance questions.
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Personal Encyclopedias
Last year, I visited my grandmother's house for the first time after the pandemic and came across a cupboard full of loose old photos. I counted 1,351 of them spanning all the way from my grandparents in their early 20s, my mom as a baby, to me in middle school, just around the time when we got our first smartphone…
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Don't you lecture me with your thirty dollar website
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Dumber phone
Less is exponentially more – Rob Pike Smart phones are useful, but they are also incredibly addictive, and that addiction is at the epicenter of Silicon Valley’s effort to grab an ever-increasing percentage of our minds. If a substance or behavior controls us, it becomes our master, and that just won’t do. For the…
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Marble Fountain
I really enjoy procedural generation, especially systems designed to work with hardware outputs. After starting work at Formlabs in September of 2023 and gaining access to much nicer printers than I was used to, I started wanting to tackle some large algorithmic structure projects. Complexity is free in 3d printing…
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How to Be Successful
I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up...
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KDE is now my favorite desktop
From my last blog post , I am now using KDE as the desktop environment for my gaming rig. The reason is because I want a reasonably easy to use Linux desktop for when my wife needs to use the PC for something other than gaming, and this was the reason why my "traditional" Sway setup was a no-go.
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Frances Allen has died
The IBM Research blog is the home for stories told by the researchers, scientists, and engineers inventing What’s Next in science and technology.