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The Tail End (2015)
No matter what your age, you may, without realizing it, be enjoying the very last chapter of the relationships that matter most to you. Make it count.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,940 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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You don’t need to work on hard problems (2020)
A lot of smart college students end up with the idea that “solving hard technical problems” is the best thing they can do with their life—probably because that’s the only thing they’ve ever been rewarded for so far.
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The Queen's Duck
Brian Wigginton
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Progress Beats Perfect
This is a favorite saying of mine. I use it to motivate myself when I feel disheartened about how much I have to learn and improve. If I do ...
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Overthinking
I used to be a pathological overthinker. Everything had to be carefully planned, from the words I would say to the baker to order a baguette to all the insignificant details of any of the projects I worked on. Is it better to tweet at 18:00 or 18:05? Rust or
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Quality and Effort (2018)
It seems as though the opposite of “careless” ought to be “careful.” That the best way to avoid avoidable errors is to try harder, to put more care into the work. This means…
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Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome
Some of the most successful people have secretly felt like they were terrible at their jobs. Imposter syndrome affects almost everyone, but there are a few things you can overcome this fear.
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Stages of Denial
It is a lazy Tuesday afternoon. Perhaps you were idly browsing your favorite news aggregator, or visiting The Orange Website to wade through murky startup groupthink in search of interesting links.
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The Top Shelf Principle (2019)
The Top Shelf Principle | Mo — Previously built Standard Note...
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Difficult math is about recognizing patterns
Jeff Bezos tells a great story about the smartest guy he knew at Princeton. He and a classmate were working on a really tough partial differential equation and getting nowhere. They spent 3 hours on the problem and gave up.
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Am I stuck in a local maximum?
On long-standing controversies, biases, and failures of communication.
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I closed a lot of browser tabs
I am widely admired at work for my ability to have many, many browser tabs open. (That, at least, is what I take from the frequent shouts of “holy cow, man, look at your browser!”) Nonetheless, I have long thought that it would be worth getting my total tab count down. I have tabs open for a bunch of reasons.
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I'm reading the FT and WSJ from 100 years ago each week leading to 1929
This week, the Dow languishes near multi-decade lows and blue-chip stocks trade below book value.
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Once an Addict, Always an Addict?
Is an addictive personality a thing? Is an addict’s brain permanently broken?
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Driving 1725km in an electric car in 2 days
At 6:30 PM on Wednesday August 4 th my 15-year-old daughter and I pulled up the Jaguar I-Pace electric car in front of my 91-year-old Mom’s place in Regina, Saskatchewan. I was tired and achey because I’d just finished driving 1,725km (1,072 miles) across two days to see her for the first time since Covid started. I…
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Reflections on 10k Hours of Programming
I'm certainly not a world-class expert, but I have put my 10,000 hours of deliberate practice into programming. Here are 31 of my reflections on programming.
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Apophenia: How the Internet Transforms the Individual into a Conspiracy of One
How the Internet Transforms the Individual into a Conspiracy of One
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Early Retirement (2006)
The joys, challenges, and some practical aspects of retiring young.
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The surreal experience of my first developer job
Nearly ten years ago I graduated with a degree in Mathematics & Computing, with a keen interest in pursuing a career involving maths and programming, but with little idea how. First and foremost I had decided to stay in Manchester after uni, rather than risk getting stuck at my parents' if I moved...
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Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance
I love spreadsheets. Spreadsheet programs like Microsoft’s Excel, Apple’s Numbers and Google Sheets are the secret heroes of our civilization.
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Back to Linux
Background Note: I’ve started writing this article about one year ago (September 2020), but I dropped it at some point. Its final version is way less ambitious than my original plans for it, mostly because I forgot some of things that were on mind back then. Still, better than nothing. A long time ago (in 2011) I…
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How to summon and sell your soul to Satan and other devils
Selling your soul has never been easier. Today, there are plenty of demonology books that teach you how to bargain with Lucifer, written by authors who have probably done this themselves on multiple occasions.
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Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)
Well I'm in the working world again. I've found myself a well-paying gig in the engineering industry, and life finally feels like it's returning to normal after my nine months of traveling. Beca...
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I Am Parting with My Crypto Library
The time has come for me to find a new home for my (paper) cryptography library. It’s about 150 linear feet of books, conference proceedings, journals, and monographs—mostly from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. My preference is that it goes to an educational institution, but will consider a corporate or personal home if…