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Someone is pretending to be me
One random day - someone spills the beans. They were picked to impersonate me and get a job using my information.
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 816 posts.
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After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
Many companies have been trying to disrupt email by making it proprietary. So far, they have failed. Email keeps being an open protocol. Hurray? No hurray. Email is not distributed anymore. You just cannot create another first-class node of this ne
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But life had other plans
In May 2021 I took a sabbatical to take care of family, but things did not go as planned.
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I got pwned by my cloud costs
I have been, and still remain, a massive proponent of "the cloud". I built Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) as a cloud-first service that took advantage of modern cloud paradigms such as Azure Table Storage to massively drive down costs at crazy levels of performance I
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Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
rant about me wasting time
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Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
I grew up believing that following the news makes you a better citizen. Eight years after having quit, that idea now seems ridiculous—that consuming a particularly unimaginative information produ...
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Mourning loss as a remote team
This is a hard one to write about. Last year our team lost Pete, a long time engineer. Pete took his own life. He had battled mental health issues for some time.
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Installing a payphone in my house
When I was growing up in the 90s, I remember wanting to get on the Internet. My parents weren’t going to help me, so I called up an ISP and said I wanted to set up an account. They asked for my name and I gave them a fake name. And then they asked for a credit card number and I told them I had to find my wallet and…
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Bits of advice I wish I had known
UPDATE Several years ago on my 68th birthday I wrote up 68 bits of advice for my adult children, and posted them here. The bits were extremely popular, and they were widely shared by others. I was encouraged to write … Continue reading →
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Intentionally making close friends
One of the most valuable experiments I ever ran was intentionally practicing the skill of making close friends, and this directly led to most of my friends today. This post is the story of that experiment, and distills the lessons learned
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What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
Here’s my story… About 20 years ago or so, I was at a Salvation Army auction one morning. They were selling of tons (literally) of junk they’d had donated to them over the last few year…
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An odd discovery on Spotify
New releases; good catastrophes; an alluring and unnerving encounter.
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I should have loved biology
In biology class, biology wasn't presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing.
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Scratch is a big deal
While none of us were paying attention, Scratch has transformed from a programming language for kids to a massive online community of self-guided, student-pr...
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I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you
In which I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft… and give it to you.
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Fake Books
Machine-generated books are here. I bought one by accident.
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Outdated vs. Complete: In defense of apps that don’t need updates
On August 22nd, I got an email out of the blue from Apple that notified me that I had a new App Review message. It was for my app, WorldAnimals, a light-hearted game for guessing animal onomatopoeia sounds in different languages.Usually, you receive a message after you submit a new version to the...
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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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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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Don't you lecture me with your thirty dollar website
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I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed
When discussing scams and social engineering attacks, it's easy for security experts to imply the victims of these attacks should have known better. And, as much as we may like to think we'd handle these situations so much better, that's just not true.
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Writing one sentence per line
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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Just don’t
Sometimes it’s wrong to begin a phrase with the word “just”. I offer as evidence two such situations. I think there’s a common thread to be drawn.