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Math Academy pulled me out of the Valley of Despair
Here’s to being a preserving student for life.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,939 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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Drug addiction: The complex truth
We’re told studies have proven that drugs like heroin and cocaine instantly hook a user. But it isn’t that simple – little-known experiments over 30 years ago tell a very different tale. Drugs are …
3454
Where do you find the time for side projects?
You work 40 hours per week. You have family commitments. How can you work on your side-hustle, when you have a limited amount of energy and time?
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A year without caffeine (part 2)
(continued from part 1) Diagnosis and prescription The family doctor stared at me sternly, then issued his diagnosis and prescription. He explained that my guts were mostly like in a bad state of …
3456
Work/Life Balance Will Make You a Better Software Engineer
It’s tempting to believe that taking your work home will make you a better software engineer, and that work/life balance will limit your learning. For some software developers programming isn’t just a job: it’s something to do for fun, sometimes even a reason for being. If you love coding and coding is your job, why…
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Why you should write
Be a creator, not just a consumer.
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So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams
A Toast to the Frood Who Really Knew Where His Towel Was
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Speed running Monkey Island
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
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Effective Learning Strategies for Programmers
In early September I gave a keynote at Kiwi PyCon in New Zealand on effective learning for programmers. There were two pieces to the talk: one about …
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Your load is too heavy: Zork deep reading
This past weekend a screenshot went around Twitter (my part of Twitter at least!) weight = num_items * Max_held_mult; if( weight <= random(100) ) ?label8; print "You're holding too many things already!"; new_line; rfalse; .label8; ...
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Twenty years of my blog
I started this blog on June 12th 2002—twenty years ago today! To celebrate two decades of blogging, I decided to pull together some highlights and dive down a self-indulgent nostalgia …
3464
I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
I took me 7 years to admit I'd made a mistake in choosing a Z-Wave Wireless Lighting System. Finally I've taken stock and replaced it!
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Steps Towards Happiness (2015)
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
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How the Blog Broke the Web (2017)
I first got online in 1993, back when the Web had a capital letter — three, in fact — and long before irony stretched its legs and unbuttoned its flan
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Insurance is like gambling, don't overdo it
Insurance companies, like betting companies, need high margins to keep operating. You are paying that margin.
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Don’t Quit When It Gets Hard
Read this if you're thinking about quitting. I personally think about quitting three or four times a month. I've found a way to NOT quit.
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Going “Write-Only”
Joey Hess inspires me. He lives in a cabin and programs Haskell on a drastically under-powered netbook. He harvests all his electricity from the sun with a homemade electrical system. Joey has designed his computing life to be highly distributed like the git version control he loves. His internet connection is…
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How to Write an Opening Sentence
Bioinformatics, genomics, and Javascript
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I Just Poured Water on my Scanner
Chip that come into the museum are all scanned on a Canon 5600F flatbed scanner. It has a good (there is some better though) depth of field, and its fast. Typically chips are scanned at 300dpi, or for small ones (or ones that have a die visible) 600dpi. This keep the file sizes reasonable, yet still allows them to be…
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What Shape Are You?
This post is a guest post from my friend Brian Sharp My post before this was a kind of therapy / Buddhism / personal growth kind of deal, but I also spend a lot of time thinking ab...
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Can Grafana run Doom?
Using time series panels and Grafana Live streaming, Doom fans can now pursue total annihilation on Grafana.
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No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda
When working remotely, asking for help is often just a few keystrokes away. So it's tempting to "quickly" ask someone for support when you get stuck.
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Apprenticeships Beat Classrooms
Apprenticeships beat schooling. Here's why they're a superior method for learning, and how you can apply this to the things you want to master.
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Without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements—A Review