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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,743 posts.
Spaced Repetition is Awesome
I've recently become motivated to learn Portuguese. Mulheres bonitas sao muito motivado. It's not the first time this has happened to me - in the past I've attempted to learn Spanish, Farsi and Konkani. But it is the first time I've made significant progress and it's the first time that I …
How I went from writing 2,000 words a day to 10,000 words a day
When I started writing The Spirit War (Eli novel #4), I had a bit of a problem. I had a brand new baby and my life (like every new mother'...
Why I’ll never create modules for VCV Rack anymore–and what I’ll make instead
An old article, now removed due to being an old time capsule.
How to Remember More of What You Learn with Spaced Repetition (2016)
Using spaced repetition in conjunction with other study techniques can help you memorize information much, much more quickly. Here's how to do it.
A decade of writing at Mozilla
Today—April 3, 2016—marks the tenth anniversary of the day I started working at Mozilla as a writer on the Mozilla Developer Center project (now, of course, the Mozilla Developer Network or MDN). T…
The Feynman Technique 2.0: How to Take Your Learning to the Next Level
A deep dive into the Feynman Technique, a method designed to learn through teaching. How can we upgrade it with a few teaching principles?
I stopped following the news
A personal reflection on the decision to stop following daily news and its impact on my well-being.
Thinking with pen and paper
With the world inundated with productivity apps, it feels nice to return to the tried and tested pen-and-paper methods. In this blog post, I'll share my anal...
Are Experts Real?
Credentials, Expertise, and Feedback Loops
Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application
The start of my sabbatical has given me a moment to reflect on my publications. But my CV only shows a list of neatly cataloged papers: title, authors, conference. Each one appearing no different from another. But how each paper ended up published is its own story, a story about people and opportunity.
iOS Ships Dvorak, Finally
I’m a huge fan of the Dvorak keyboard layout, but if there’s one thing I love more than “Evolved vs Engineered” solution debates, is that nothing wins the ”standardized” debate.
Your heart rate at gunpoint
It’s a beautiful evening, albeit a little cold. I’m heading home after a long day. I’m walking down a familiar street. I feel safe, I feel…
Ego Death
Social media aggravates the ego. Virtuous content drifts to the extremes and becomes counter productive at scale. Focusing on external validation is futile and robs the soul of a deeper meaning.
Steve Pavlina: 30 days since I quit Facebook
It’s been about 30 days since I quit Facebook , so I wanted to share an update on what that’s been like. Many others also quit the service last month, and many more are on the fence as to whether they should do the same.
Thoughts on, and pictures of, the original Macintosh User Manual
I recently purchased an original Macintosh User Manual (thanks eBay !). I had seen one at a garage sale, and was struck by how it had to explain a total paradigm shift in interacting with computers. I figured I could learn something about helping make innovation happen.
Why it's great to write blog posts
I’ve been blogging for close to four years now. I started blogging because I wanted to pick up a new skill (writing) and challenge myself to do something new. Because I blog about what is both my work and hobby - software development and more specifically, cloud/platform engineering - it’s relatively simple to come up…