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Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
What’s odd about you is what’s interesting.
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 668 posts.
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Playing in the Creek
When I was a really small kid, one of my favorite activities was to try and dam up the creek in my backyard. I would carefully move rocks into high walls, pile up leaves, or try patching the holes with sand. The goal was just to see how high I could get the lake, knowing that if I plugged every hole, eventually the…
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In a high-stress work environment, prioritize relationships
How high is the stress I am talking about? You are commuting all you think is that you might snap today, you might quit today. That is what I am calling a hi...
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Strengths Are Your Weaknesses
The qualities you value most in engineers are also creating your biggest problems. Here’s how to handle this paradox.
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Watt The Fox?
I recently got a new notebook and noticed that the speakers would occasionally emit a faint but annoying white noise. This issue was only noticeable in a quiet room when no music or other audio was playing through the speakers.
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I am giving up on Intel and have bought an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D
The Intel 285K CPU in my high-end 2025 Linux PC died again! 😡 Notably, this was the replacement CPU for the original 285K that died in March, and after reading through the reviews of Intel CPUs on my electronics store of choice, many of which (!) mention CPU replacements, I am getting the impression that Intel’s…
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Calendar.txt
Keep your calendar in a plain text file. Calendar.txt is versionable, supports all operating systems and easily syncs with Android mobile phone.
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Minimum effective dose
I am still recovering from my failed root canal (and still have one visit to complete the procedure), so I have been hesitant in taking up my regular exercise again because I don't want to distract my immune system from my tooth's healing. So when I went to the gym today for the first time...
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The first time I was almost fired from Apple
I was hired on at Apple in October of 1995. This was what I refer to as Apple’s circling the drain period. Maybe you remember all the doomsaying — speculation that Apple was going to be shuttering soon. It’s a little odd perhaps then that they were hiring at all but apparently Apple reasoned that they nonetheless…
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Craft software that makes people feel something
Recently, people have been asking me why I’m pausing Boo to work on a programming language. I think it would actually be cool to write down how I feel.
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My Struggle with Doom Scrolling
Reading, writing, cooking, and maybe some other random explorations.
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Open Sauce is a confoundingly brilliant Bay Area event
This is the second year I brought my Dad (a now-retired radio engineer and co-host of Geerling Engineering) to Open Sauce, a Bay Area maker faire-like event, dreamed up by William Osman and featuring hundreds of exhibits ranging from mad science, to vintage electronics, to games, to world-record-breaking Rubik's Cube…
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Youth and what happens when it's gone
And what happens when it's gone.
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If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
Why and how to preserve digital content in plaintext format for long-term accessibility and reuse
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Our Farewell from Google Play
Our project started in 2016 with the goal of offering alternatives to apps with basic functionality that demanded – back then at install time – many permissions they did not need. From our humble beginnings with Privacy Friendly Torchlight, our apps have always been available in the Google Play Store. Our current…
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It’s still worth blogging in the age of AI
Although it might seem that AI will make it pointless, I still think it's worth blogging.
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You are how you act
You are the sum of your behaviors not your intentions
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My phone is an ereader now
I got a Kobo in 2016 after borrowing my mom's old one for a year before that. It probably is responsible for getting me reading again after high school. I used to be an avid reader, the sort of kid who would have to be told to put down the book and go to sleep, and who would then creep slowly to the bookshelf to pick…
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Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet
Why owning your own domain and publishing on the open web beats renting attention from Reddit, Discord, Facebook, and other mega-concentrated platforms.
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YAGRI: You are gonna read it
YAGNI, or, You aren't gonna need it , is a standard piece of advice that warns against over engineering and building too many features too early. I think its great and saves you from wasting time, which can kill a project.
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3D modeling with paper
Exploring the process of designing and assembling 3D models from paper.
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Perfume reviews
Discussion of dabbling in samplers of ‘avant-garde’ perfumes and other perfumes; what I liked and did not like, and what 2 perfumes I ultimately bought for myself (Acqua di Sale and Kyoto Incense).
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You did no fact checking, and I must scream
I'm neither a journalist nor a professional fact checker but, the thing is, it's has never been easier to check basic facts. Yeah, sure, there's a world of misinformation out there, but it doesn't take much effort to determine if something is likely to be true. There are brilliant tools like reverse Image Search which…
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Mikeal Rogers has died
Mikeal Rogers, my best friend, my colleague, confidant, and one of a kind partner in countless late night chats and restless travel sprints, has died. Mikeal died of aggressive cancer. Words feel wholly inadequate because I want to capture the sweep of what he meant to me and to the
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Guess I'm a rationalist now
A week ago I attended LessOnline, a rationalist blogging conference featuring many people I’ve known for years—Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Zvi Mowshowitz, Sarah Constantin, Carl…
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How to motivate yourself to do a thing you don't want to do
Learn some ways to help encourage action when you feel unmotivated.
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Learning basic electronics by building fireflies
From missing real fireflies to learning basic electronics and building my own blinking "fireflies"
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I'm returning my Framework 16
My current laptop is an aging X1 Carbon generation 7, purchased some time in mid 2019. A few months ago a few keys of the keyboard stopped working, specifically the 5, 6, - , = and Delete keys. Sometimes I can get it working again by mashing one of them for a while, but it's not consistent. Given my past experiences…