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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 588 posts.
Revenge bedtime procrastination occurs when people delay going to sleep in order to feel in control of their life and schedule. This phenomenon is particularly associated with people who feel that they have little time for themselves during the day, for example due to their work schedule, so they delay sleep until…
There is no finish line. There is no winning, no losing.
I'm not smart enough for modern web development, and that's ok
Or: why you should be a lizard
A core component of making great decisions is understanding previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.
Necessary cognitive fortification against propaganda, pseudoscience, and general falsehood.
Developing Aortic Stenosis due to a Bicuspid Aortic Valve This is one doctor’s experience as an explainer to friends, family and anyone who has a bicuspid aortic valve or who, for whatever re…
People sometimes ask me: Alex, how do I learn X?. This article is a compilation of advice I usually give. This is things that worked for me rather than the most awesome things on earth. I do consider every item on the list to be fantastic though, and I am forever grateful to people putting these resources together.
I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one.
It became real when I saw the list. When I saw the rubric.
If you were instructed to draw a leaf, you might draw a green, vaguely eye-shaped thing with a stem. But when you study a real leaf, say an elm leaf, it’s got much more g...
Let me introduce you to WordStar 4.0, a popular word processor from the early 80s. WordStar 4.0 As old as it seems, George R.R. Martin used it to write “A Song of Ice and Fire”. Why would someone use such an old piece of software to write over 5,000 pages? I love how he puts it: It does everything I want a word…
Couple of weeks ago, we were discussing random things at work, and we landed on the topic of discipline. One of my colleagues was praising me for having a very disciplined life. It felt as if he was talking about someone else.
If you succeed, you will fail. Something said at a client engagement I was at some time ago. I figure enough time has passed that it is worth sharing this story. One of the early engagements was to …
It may not be possible for us to ever reach empirical definitions of "good code" or "clean code", which means that any one person's opinions about another person's opinions about "clean code" are necessarily highly subjective. I cannot review Robert C. Martin's 2008 book Clean Co...
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Like almost all rules, there are cases where breaking them is a good idea and seasoned writers may well object with "but" responses for some of these. Thus, consider the rules below as mental rumble strips - you should probably slow down and think if you encounter these cases.
Bees have a dance to indicate to others where food is. It’s called the waggle dance. Great name. But a significant portion of bees in a hive completely ignore the waggle dance and venture off on their own accord. Scientists studied this and were perplexed as to why. It
Thank you to David Peter for your hard work making the world a better place through open source.
A practical guide to starting a personal blog you can keep for years, without depending on social platforms or fragile tools.
This is the first in (maybe) a series of “Tales From Tech Support”, which are true stories from my point of view. I’ll probably only post these on a Friday. In the 1990s, I worked as a contractor for a large, well-established accounting firm. We’d often buy new equipment and unpack it at the helpdesk, throw away all…
Where the hard edge of physics meets the vulnerable metaphysics of the human heart.
A guide for fourteen-year-olds and fourteen-year-olds at heart
Within my particular subfield of theoretical computer science there’s perhaps no individual more celebrated than Edsger Dijkstra. His career spanned half-a-century, beginning with a young ... Read more
