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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 816 posts.

Life, Learning & Writing
2022
550

Practising Programming

When we see a world-class musician flawlessly play challenging music, it can be tempting to imagine that they were always able to do so. A moment’s thought makes it obvious that they must have had to spend huge amounts of time practising basic techniques in order to reach that level. What’s less obvious is that they…

551

What chords do you need?

You famously only need four chords to play everything, or maybe it's only three. But how true is this really? I decided to go look and see what was common. I looked at a large number of transcribed songs, writing down which chords were used. This isn't perfect: some chords are more optional than others, but it's about…

553

Monetizing hobbies

I don’t know if this is a new trend or if I’m just noticing it now, but more and more the popular wisdom seems to be that you shouldn’t monetize your hobby. That if you do, it turns it into a job, a hustle1; that it sucks all the fun out of it. Putting aside for now the fact that some people might want to turn their…