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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 560 posts.
I've worked with a number of clients on Elixir projects and I've onboarded myself, I've been onboarded and I've onboarded others. And compared to my experiences with PHP/Python/Javascript and my limited experience with C#/.Net I have experienced quite a difference.
An old article, now removed due to being an old time capsule.
Credentials, Expertise, and Feedback Loops
How I am using 50+ sources of my personal data
It is said that there are three things you must do in your lifetime: plant a tree, have a child, and write a book. I recently finished the last one. Nevertheless, I wrote a programming book.
In Advice to a Young Scientist, Nobel Prize-winning biologist Peter Medawar shares practical advice for people planning to embark on a career in the sciences—and curious people in general. Here, we summarize some of Medawar’s key insights.
A few months ago, I stumbled upon this post where someone spent 9 years making a shed . No knocks on them, but it’s not even a particularly good-looking shed.
In this post I'll describe how to sequence a human genome at home, something that's only recently become possible.
If I ask you to think of an elephant do you see an elephant in your head when you close your eyes? I don’t. Regardless of how descriptive the imagery, story or text I can’t create any pictures in m…
The non-writing UX is bad enough to render product unusuable
“There’s that sort of sense that many technical people will see or feel when you see something and you know what it could be, and you know it could be important, and you see companies just doing it wrong — there’s that powerful desire to fix it and do it right and show them sort of how it’s supposed to be done”
Maybe I'm paranoid. But, I think there's a lot of smart people out there dedicating their life's work to make others keep watching videos. Since YouTube's incomprehensible decision to remove dislikes count it's become even easier to waste time on worthless content. In this blog post, I'll describe a simple trick that…
How many times have you sat there trying to work through a technical problem, and thought:
I’ve been delving deeper into the vast and strange world of knowledge organizing tools (notes apps, contact organizers, personal search engines). During this rather abstract expedition, one of my goals has been to emerge with some opinionated thesis about the way these tools should be designed to harbor and extend our…
Starting this fall, I'll be pursuing a Masters in Computer Science at Georgia Tech. Here's how I think Linux on Chromebooks just might get me through the program.
My kid sister has been using Macs for about 5 years. She bought her 2012 MacBook Pro used on eBay for $500, and it lasted longer than any other laptop she has bought new or used. When she accidentally spilled orange juice on her MacBook two days ago, she asked my recommendation on getting the new M1 MacBook Pro or…
New data suggests someone has compromised more than 21,000 Microsoft Exchange Server email systems worldwide and infected them with malware that invokes both KrebsOnSecurity and Yours Truly by name.
Over-engineering for fun (and not much profit)
Since 2008, I've ripped every DVD and Blu-Ray I bought to my Mac, with a collection of SD and HD media totaling around 2 TB today. To make that library accessible, I've always used iTunes and the iTunes Shared Library functionality that—while it still exists today—seems to be on life support, in kind of a "we still…
If you regularly read cognitive science or psychology blogs (or even just the lowly New York Times!), you’ve probably heard of something called the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger e…
Five months after my renunciation day, I received my Certificate of Loss of Nationality today. People keep asking me how that feels...
One of the constant refrains which has bemused me during the pandemic is all the people saying how much kids want to go back to school.
Working hard is a great way to accelerate learning, but it can come at a cost. This post shares my experience and lessons taken from great role models I've found along the way.
The philosopher Kwame Appiah writes that “in life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you’re playing.” When I try to figure out what game I’m playing, I see that for the last 25 years I have been playing […]
