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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 662 posts.
These lines are very difficult for me to write because I feel like digging my own grave. AI systems are improving by leaps and bounds. From the early 2022 fumbling release of ChatGPT, which couldn’t correctly count the number of a’s in my name (it claimed two), we reached OpenAI’s release of math papers where an…
My wife and I recently went on a 7 week holiday around Europe. Although we each took a massive backpack, we wanted to travel fairly lightly. I took a single universal power brick. This little unit was all I needed to charge my various gadgets. It has a hefty USB-C PD (Power Delivery) port for rapid charging of my…
A blog about software craft and quality
Working Notes: a commonplace notebook for recording & exploring ideas. Home . Site Map . Subscribe . More at expLog . — Kunal
[I shared this note with my team earlier this week, and am posting it here as well. I hope it is interesting or helpful for others working on building product in the age of AI.]
Effective writing for software developers
And why does the brain use creatine anyway?
A kea parrot in New Zealand learned to drag traffic cones onto a highway so cars would stop and humans would feed it. That sent me down a rabbit hole on how we actually measure bird intelligence.
One of my core software engineering practices is writing, by hand, in a physical notebook [1] . It's one of the most important things I do to remain productive and effective. Maybe the single most important. And it's a practice that I see very few others using!
My great-great-grandfather thought he’d be replaced by technology too. He was a farrier in Mandres-en-Barrois, the small village in rural France where I grew up.
and why communication is so important
NetNewsWire 1.0 for Mac shipped 23 years ago today! 🎸🎩🕶️ Here’s where things are on this particular February 11: we just shipped 7.0 for Mac and iOS, and now we’re working on NetNewsWire 7.0.1. After a big release, no matter how careful we are, there are often some regressions to fix and tweaks to make right away, so…
The concept of recursive self-improvement (RSI) dates back to I. J. Good (1965), where he defined an “ultraintelligent machine” as a system that can surpass humans in all intellectual activities and design better machines to improve itself. Yudkowsky (2008) used the phrase “recursive self-improvement” for a specific…
I’m a big fan of the Zohran Mamdani administration.
AI makes intellectual contribution superfluous.
A reflection on returning to Kagi after trying some alternatives including the much worse search engine called Google.
Why does a five-minute hallway conversation sometimes solve what a week of solo thinking couldn't?
For at least 10 years, every Time Machine set up I have been in charge of, or tasked with maintaining for someone else, has eventually run into an issue where it stops backing up successfully. The only solution has been to start over, to not inherit backup state and to manually delete the old backup. My experience…
"It turns out" became a favorite phrase of mine sometime in mid 2006, which, it turns out, was just about the time that I first started tearing through Paul Graham essays . Coincidence?
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, […]
There they sit, the preschooler class encircling their mentor, the substitute teacher.
if you always wanted to but think it isn't worth telling a speaker you liked their talk, this is your encouragement post to do so.
Paul McGowan makes stereos. To paraphrase his insight: The musicality isn’t a feature you add to an amplifier. It’s what’s left when you stop ruining it. To expand: Customer delig…
Table of Contents: Intro, Morning- Flight Attendant Training, Pilot Training., Lunch- Southwest Store, Social Media Serendipity., Afternoon- Network Operations Center, TechOps Hangar, Herb and Coll...
Updated on June 17th, 21st, 22nd, 24th, 26th, and 27th, and July 3rd. See notes below. OK, so Mythos finds really challenging security bugs, right? That’s why it’s cordoned off from the hoi polloi, to protect the world from such a powerful finder of exploits. But, many other LLMs can find bugs. Is Mythos uniquely…
At some point, “moving fast” stopped being a practical concern and became a moral position. You see it damn near everywhere now. How fast can we ship this...
Constructing a skyscraper is a massive undertaking. You need architectural blueprints, council permits, and safety audits before the first piece of steel is even ordered. It requires hundreds of people coordinating over months or years. You can’t just throw up some drywall and hope the building holds weight. Then…
