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Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 517 posts.

2020
391

Ginger milk curd (2014)

With only 3 ingredients you can make a tasty gel within minutes. The gel is very fragile and easily “looses” liquid, in this case whey, which is seen as a clear drop under the spoon. This loss of liquid from a gel is known as syneresis.

397

Yes, I am still learning Rust

Recently, I got yet another nice email from a “talent sourcing specialist” asking me if I’d like to work for their company. This one stood out from the usual blockchain recruiting spam by actually looking at this blog. And they told me their expectations were lowered by the front matter stating that I’m currently…

403

Bokehlicious Selfies

I signed up for the excellent fastai MOOC recently, and one of the project ideas I had was the idea of adding bokehs to selfies using Deep learning. Most phones have a not so great selfie (front-side) camera and therefore this idea has some merits.

405

Healthy Self-Doubt

At some point in my software engineering/leadership career, it became evident that I was expected to have Impostor Syndrome. Indeed, it became clear that all underrepresented people in tech were expected to have Impostor Syndrome. I noticed this mostly in groups of women where especially the younger women would talk…

409

Talk Less, Listen More

I spent a whole bunch of time this fall and winter taking calls from young financial advisors. I try to schedule this stuff on Friday mornings when things are a little quieter for me. They DM me or email me and I just say yes. I have 15 minutes for any kid reading my stuff...

411

A Light Box in Heavy Times

My son is nearing his second birthday, which makes him nearly two years old. When he was only four months old I decided that I would make him something with buttons. I didn’t have much more of an idea than that, but I ordered one hundred illuminated buttons and started mulling what to do with them. Nothing much…

417

Would You Have Fallen for This Phone Scam?

You may have heard that today’s phone fraudsters like to use caller ID spoofing services to make their scam calls seem more believable. But you probably didn’t know that these fraudsters also can use caller ID spoofing to trick your bank into giving up information about recent transactions on your account — data that…

419

Don't Shave That Yak (2005)

The single best term I’ve learned this year. I want to give you the non-technical definition, and as is my wont, broaden it a bit. Yak Shaving is the last step of a series of steps that occur…