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Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,743 posts.
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What I've learned from jj
How Jujutsu's flexibility and safety changed my approach to version control.
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What My PhD Was Like
What it looks like to do a PhD: the view from my desk. Recently, I have been talking to many prospective Computer Science PhD students ...
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Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
In the summer of 2020, I took a 3 months sabbatical in order to finish an album. The experience deeply transformed how I make music – I now know I can make ...
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I'd not buy a LG monitor
There is a video by Gamers Nexus making the rounds that makes me really angry. It reports about LG's latest practise to add blatant spyware to a monitor. Or to be precise to the *software* application associated with that monitor. The icing is that Windows apparently automatically downloads this software by default…
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How I Use Notion
This post is a fairly comprehensive discussion of how I use Notion (a free personal knowledge management app) to organise various aspects of my life: project management, reading, academics, plans/goals, investing, and more. The post is not designed to be read linearly – pick and choose the bits that are relevant to…
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A $5000 Chair
This the story of a black faux-leather chair, the kind you can buy at Walmart for $99, that ended up costing me five grand. Very early in the days of Distil, my partner Steve and I hooked up with t…
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My Friend Bob Cringely
Bob Cringely died on Oct 3, 2026
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How to Teach a Child to Argue
Figaro rips the innards out of things people say and reveals the rhetorical tricks and pratfalls. For terms and definitions, click here . (What are figures of speech?) Ask Figaro a question!
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Useful Spy Books
Reading a good book is a great joy. And recommending a good book is almost as enjoyable. I’ve long been fascinated by books on espionage, and this contributed in no small part to me eventually joining the Dutch intelligence world, and later, rejoining it in some fashion. If you have favorite books that should be on…
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Ratfactor's illustrated guide to folding fitted sheets
Note to the impatient: You can just scroll down to the drawings of fitted sheets being folded. You won’t hurt my feelings. (I’ll never even know.) But you may want to bookmark this page for later instead. You can get fast at folding fitted sheets. But to learn how to fold fitted sheets is going to take some patience…
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Cruel optimism and lazy pessimism
Do you remember the avocado toast guy? I read Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus recently (you should read it, it’s great), and I learned that someone1 has come up with a name for this sort of modern reinterpretation of “let them eat cake”: cruel optimism. Cruel optimism, the way Hari interprets it2, boils down to the folly…
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Stop saying "just" (2019)
Do you work in Software Engineering, and have you seen messages or sentences like these before?
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Call yourself titles
We constantly question ourselves when attempting anything new for the first time, which is daunting. And what’s worse, it prevents us from doing anything new, so we can’t change who we are. If you’ve always been terrible at sports and want to start working out, the natural reaction after a few attempts is to stop and…
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Writing for Half-Life
(File dated November 9, 1998) PREFACE: Another file from the same disk with the Nihilanth sketches, this one, if it is to believed, written the day after we shipped Half-Life. I do believe it because the file’s creation date is indeed November 9, 1998, and I am not l33t enough to know how to fake […]
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I wish I'd self-published sooner
It took until this year to write my first eBook and now it generates revenue while I sleep. What's holding you back? Learn from my experience so far.
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You Don’t Need Permission
I was pleasantly surprised to hear from Suresh, an ex-student I’ve known for a long time. A U.S. citizen he was now the head of sales and marketing for a company in London selling medical devices t…
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A History of the Silmarils in the Fifth Age
[Spoiler warning for The Silmarillion] I. The Silmarillion describes the fate of the three Silmarils. Earendil kept one, and traveled with it through the sky, where it became the planet Venus. Maed…
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