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Advice to young people, the lies I tell myself (2024)
Discover insightful advice for young people, emphasizing choices, confidence, and personal growth through lived experiences.
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,743 posts.
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Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
I like to write, and occasionally I idly consider the possibility that I should do it for a living. Then I remind myself: writing is a…
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Broccoli Man, Remastered
A breakdown of how I used modern AI tools (Veo 3.1 and Nano Banana) to create a new version of a Google cultural classic.
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Two years after quitting my job: 2013 in review
If you’ve been reading this blog for a few years, you know the journey I’ve gone through: In October 2011 I left a startup job (making $60,000/year) to freelance and build and sell products. 2012 was an amazing year where I built this blog, wrote two books, and doubled my income. So what happened in […]
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Working from home
The challenges of working from home full-time, and some tips on how to do so effectively.
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Misunderstanding Dunning-Kruger
There is, apparently, an increase recently in interest in the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Washington Post writes about this recently, making the obvious political observation (having to do with the current occupant of the White House). It's great that there is public interest in an important psychological phenomenon…
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Minimum Viable Self
Two decades ago, before social media existed, Zygmunt Bauman articulated a perfect description of how it would soon shape our behavior and frame our relationships to one another.
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Error Handling in Baby Toys
Electrical baby toys are interesting to disassemble and look at how it’s made. Not up to the …
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Stop Taking Yourself So Seriously
Discuss this post on Hacker News. My workout plan this summer would make any fitness guru shudder. I try to go to the gym once or twice a week. I spend 25
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Scott Alexander Reviews Thiel's Zero to One
I. Zero To One might be the first best-selling business book based on a Tumblr. Stanford student Blake Masters took Peter Thiel’s class on startups. He posted his notes on Tumblr after each l…
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Blog about things you don't understand yet
Every post I publish represents at least two things I’ve learned: the thing that prompted me to write the post, and the thing I learned in the course of writing…
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Productive Procrastination
Productive procrastination is real. But understanding why we avoid the work we actually love might be the key to getting more of it done.
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Increasing the surface area of blogging
Open feeds, OPML, books, blogs and graphs
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Chinchilla’s death
“With more careful calculations, one can win; with less, one cannot” — Sun Tzu, The Art of War .
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Touched (2015)
opera , paintweb , gsoc2009 , linux , mozilla , moodle , firefox , canvas , ubuntu , tutorials .
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Droste’s Lair
A swords-and-sorcery programming environment for building and counting mathematical structures
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Power imbalances and sex
I saw a gif of a woman talking about how women make less than men in the film industry, ending with ‘the only industry where women make more than men is porn!’ Her point was about the o…
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Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X – Part 2
This is the second in my series on finding an alternative to Mac OS X. Part 1 was about evaluating 13 alternative operating systems and then choosing one to use full time. The selected OS was elementary OS. The motivation for this change is to get access to better hardware since Apple is neglecting the Mac lineup.
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Facts don’t change our minds (2018)
Why don't facts change our minds? This article explains the logic of false beliefs and proposes a better system for constructive conversation.
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On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (1988)
The second part of this talk pursues some of the scientific and educational consequences of the assumption that computers represent a radical novelty. In order to give this assumption clear contents, we have to be much more precise as to what we mean in this context by the adjective "radical". We shall do so in the…
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What is Social Status?
Understanding dominance, prestige, and power
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All the jobs I failed to get
A few years ago, Johannes Haushofer published a CV of failures. In it, he lists all the grants he wasn't awarded, positions he didn't get, papers rejected. I think that people need to be more open about failure. None of us are perfect - despite what our social media presence says - and all of us suffer rejection. But…
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I tricked myself into working out 3 times per week
…and why I think it'll work for everyone