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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 530 posts.
On October 20th, my seven year old son Nikolas suffered cardiac arrest while undergoing a procedure at the hospital to treat an underlying congenital condition. The doctors performed CPR and succeeded in reviving him but ultimately he suffered catastrophic brain damage. My wife and I were in the hospital for
Between 2009 and 2012, Apple iPhones and iPod Touches included a feature called “Send to YouTube” that allowed users to upload videos directly to YouTube from the Photos app.
Today marks two years since I first set up an e-ink display in my mom’s apartment to help her live on her own with amnesia.
How I learned the old truth that when building a software product and selling it to people, "building" is just the beginning. And often, it's the easiest part.
I’m entering hospice. It’s time, and realistically past time. The squamous cell carcinoma tumors are growing, and the two doses of spot radiation I got on June 10 and 12 have utterly destroyed what…
Introduction
Reuniting AirPods with a few clever tricks
I made a messaging app for my family and my family only.
Fun stories from my time working as an AppleCare Dispatch contractor going door to door in Chicago.
In mid-2022 I bought a new domain name.
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.
Pretend you have a really great programming day. You only have to attend a few meetings, have only a few off-topic conversations, don'...
Here’s Dave Rupert ( from my notes ): the goal of a book isn’t to get to the last page, it’s to expand your thinking. I have to constantly remind myself of…
I grew up relatively poor. I was fortunate enough to have a roof over my head, clean water, electricity, a computer, internet, and cable tv. But food was often harder to come by. This may seem like a contradiction, but when your mom has left to marry her uncle and your dad has schizophrenia, you aren’t really in…
It has been brought to my attention that I have never actually written this story down before, merely told it in person to many students for valuable lessons and also for laughs over cocktails. It is a litany of bad ideas from several people that all came together at once to reach out and zap … Continue reading "How I…
I always thought I was too dumb to understand math. During my school years, it was evident to me that for some kids math was easy, and for others like myself: painfully difficult.
If you had the choice to sculpt a leg chair out of wood or write a full-fledged audio engine, complete with kernel drivers and whatnot, inside an app for controlling monitor brightness, what wou… Wait, no, that's not a question, you would do the leg chair for sure. There's no way that other thing makes sense.
An important announcement There Is No Antimemetics Division has been picked up for publication by Penguin Random House! Find out more here. Everything below is for the original self-published version of the story only. An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring p...
In this blog I explore how I use an incident management mindset to manage a complex medical condition. I hope you enjoy it!
My endless battle with the "Project Hydra": why I can't seem to finish projects, and the strategies I'm exploring to finally complete what I start. A personal journey through productivity's thorniest challenge.
Stanford researchers hope new technique will flip lymphoma protein's normal action - from preventing cell death to triggering it.
Do “outline speedrunning”: Recursively outline an MVP, speedrun filling it in, and only then go back and perfect. This is a ~10x speed up over the ‘loading-bar’ style (more on that below) Don’t just read this article and move on. Go out and do this for the very next thing you make so you can […]
Issues with Kagi's AI focus, finances and leadership
Procrastination is a common issue , which occurs when people unnecessarily postpone decisions or actions, generally despite knowing that doing so is likely to cause them issues .
