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Early Retirement is a False Idol
The classic argument for enduring 80 to 100 hour work weeks for years on end — sacrificing relationships, hobbies, and anything else that doesn’t progress the mission — is that at the end of the rainbow lies early retirement. The reward for risking it all on a crazy startup idea. …
The Choice of Work
During the back and forth of exchange with a technical recruiter, he finally asked me what I was looking for. And so the floodgates opened. This may sound weird, but I pretty much choose employment…
How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off
When your alarm wakes you up in the morning, is it hard for you to get up right away? Do you find yourself hitting the snooze button and going right back to sleep?
Paul Buchheit: The first thing that you need to understand about humans
Humans aren't rational -- they rationalize. And I don't just mean "some of them" or "other people". I'm talking about everyone. We have a "l...
Programmer Insecurity
pickin', grinnin', and pushin' bits
Nassim Taleb's Top 10 Life Tips
Here are Nassim Taleb’s top 10 life tips, all worthwhile, from this profile: 1. Skepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be im…
Rees Re: OO
(Jonathan Rees had a really interesting response to Why Arc isn't Especially Object-Oriented , which he has allowed me to reproduce here.) Here is an a la carte menu of features or properties that are related to these terms; I have heard OO defined to be many different subsets of this list.
1,000 True Fans
This is an edited, updated version of an essay I wrote in 2008 when this now popular idea was embryonic and ragged. I recently rewrote it to convey the core ideas, minus out-of-date details. This revisited essay appears in Tim … Continue reading →
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Why is everyone in such a rush? Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced search for [ title: teach, yourself, hours, since: 2000 and found 512 such books…
Advice to the Bright and Young
One perspective on school, achievement, meaning, and life. An article on one bright young man, Moshe, recently appeared on Hacker News. For a long time I’ve been meaning to write about the su…
Sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor
Forgoing sleep is like borrowing from a loan shark. Sure you get that extra hours right now to cover for your overly-optimistic estimation, but at what price? The shark will be back and if you can’t pay, he’ll break your creativity, morale, and good-mannered nature as virtue twigs. N…
Standing versus Sitting
Almost two months ago, I decided that I wanted to try working standing up, rather than sitting down. When sitting in my comfortable, reclining office chair, my posture was terrible, my attention span was narrowing rapidly, and I was constantly battling fatigue. After looking around online a bit, it…
The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment
Introduction I’ve toyed with Linux since 2002, when I first installed Mandrake. With the latest release of Ubuntu, I was interested to see how far Linux had come since then in terms of being …
Quit your job
Today I saw a great special on Fine Living TV called Quit Your Job!. Five little companies were featured to showcase the owner’s decision to leave their daily rat dace of a life behind and dive into the uncertainty of following their dreams. Here’s the kicker: These 5 companies are some…