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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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Please don't be spooky
A piece of advice I wish I could give my manager is don't be spooky. My manager regularly messages me things like Hey, can you talk? or Got a minute now? ...
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The beauty of finished software
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…
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How Does Esperanto Sound?
When people hear Esperanto for the first time, they sometimes think they're hearing Italian, or maybe Spanish. A good amount of vocabulary in Esperanto is taken from romance roots, so this isn't totally surprising.
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The Price of Discipline
David shares how discipline can lead to unhappiness and stifle learning for both children and adults. Read now.
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What I’m Teaching my Son about Money
I’m not going to lie to you – being wealthy is a lot of fun. And I’m not just talking about novelty fun that you get from driving around in a fancy car. True wealth is more of a b…
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Why introductory chemistry is boring: a long-term historical perspective
Looking for flashcards for chemistry? Try 21st Night ! It allows you to create and share flashcards with anything on them: images, videos, equations, you name it . Plus, there’s a built-in to-do list!
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How I lost control of our bank accounts to a phone scammer
Yesterday, instead of having a productive afternoon at home, I had the privilege of sitting at the bank for a couple of hours, resolving a problem completely of my own doing: I fell for a phone scammer. My wife and I had to close our accounts—which were in excess of 25 years old—and set up new ones. I then spent hours…
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Where we're going, we don't need headphones
If there is one single complaint about work I hear most often from clients and friends, it’s that they have a hard time focusing in their office. No matter if you’re pairing with someone or need some quiet time - if you can’t escape the background noise, you’ll have a hard time getting any work done. Let me share with…
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Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
I decided to leave what had been a promising career in organic chemistry about a year ago. Deciding to leave my program, and then to leave the field entirely, was one of the hardest decisions I hav…
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Email Isn’t the Thing We’re Bad At
You and me, we’re bad at a lot of things. But email isn’t one of those things, no matter how much it seems like it.
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Getting too absorbed in side projects
Does anyone else get too absorbed in side projects that you forget about life
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Why 'Atomic Habits' may not be working for you
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.
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How I use Obsidian (2023)
My personal Obsidian vault template. A bottom-up approach to note-taking and organizing things I am interested in.
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The principle of charity: Criticize the best interpretation of an argument
The principle of charity is a philosophical principle that denotes that, when interpreting someone’s statement, you should assume that the best possible interpretation of that statement is the one that the speaker meant to convey. Accordingly, to implement the principle of charity, you should not attribute falsehoods…
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Simplify, then add delightness: On designing for children
I’ve been building Kidz Fun Art (web, iPad & Windows) since 2021, so 4 years at time of writing. It’s a tablet optimized application intended to be used by children of all ages R…
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A 45 year engineer clears up electric sauna ventilation
Malcolm has analyzed the Finnish 1992 sauna ventilation study profile to improve sauna ventilation in his own backyard sauna.
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I collect and read old computer manuals
It’s my ritual: every time I enter a secondhand bookshop, I go straight to the Sciences section and search for old computer …
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If you succeed you will fail
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 …
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How to waste time and overcomplicate things
This post ended up being fairly popular on Hacker News and sparked conversations about project management and development in the IT industry. You can find the post here .
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Bookbinding: A Tutorial (1995)
This page has been moved to http://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~dwjones/making/book/index.shtml
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The Programmers' Stone (2014)
Hi, and welcome to The Programmers' Stone. The purpose of this site is to recapture, explore and celebrate the Art of Computer Programming. By so doing we hope to help the reader either become a better programmer, understand what less experienced programmers are struggling with, or communicate more effectively with…
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My night at the museum
Thursday October 19, 2017, I arrived at the Technical Museum in Stockholm together with my two kids just a short while before 17:30. A fresh, cool and clear autumn evening. For this occasion I had purchased myself a brand new suit as I hadn't gotten one since almost twenty years before this and it had … Continue…