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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,743 posts.
I take illegal drugs for inspiration Daily Telegraph, Saturday May 21st 2005, pp 17-18 (Note: This version is very slightly different from the published, edited, version) © Sue Blackmore 2005 Every year, like a social drinker who wants to prove to herself that she’s not an alcoholic, I give up cannabis for a month. It…
I’ve written previously about various aspects of imprisonment, including practical preparations such as packing your personal possessions (r...
Focus Time Saved Me from Burnout As a staff engineer, I’m expected to write and review code, give interviews, design and review one-pagers, groom tasks, participate in meetings (standups, planning …
Last year I got into using Letterboxd, to complement my goal of watching more (good) movies. It’s got a really clean interface, the social features are useful but unobtrusive, and it makes remembering what I’ve watched and when I watched it easy. So why isn’t there a Letterboxd for books?
I’ve always wanted to visit Market Village, but I never will. And neither will you.
Earlier today Stephen Johnson, in a mailing list run by the The Unix Heritage Society , described the birth of the standard error concept: the idea that a program's error output is sent on a channel different from that of its normal output. Over the past forty years, all major operating systems and language libraries…
I have been doing app development since 2009. Initially as a hobby, then as part time work, and now as my full time job. It wasn’t until last year, however, that I found out there was an entire developer community out there supporting one another. That’s when I discovered conferences.
We've taught over 100 classes to over 1000 students 🤓
So, about a decade ago I wrote an essay on this blog about the writing of the Merchant Princes series (at that point, six slim novels—the Empire Games follow-on trilogy wasn't more than a daydream back then), in which I tried to pin down what I'd learned about writing a series.
For those that don’t know, I’ve written an ebook a couple months ago and decided to sell it online, as an experiment. It did pretty well. My expectations were very low and it was the first time I tried selling something online, so it ended up being a big success for me.
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
Please be wary, if some broker is offering this domain for sale. We will never contact you on WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram etc.
The vast majority of fiction on the web is nonergodic : stories presented as linear text. Yet, in an age where everyone has a supercomputer in their pocket, literature can take on any shape imaginable. In recent years, some pieces have taken advantage of these capabilities—not as a gimmick, but in a way that is…
The cost of delegating the writing process to other entities (like LLMs)
For two years I was on the Canadian NSERC committee that reviewed individual grant applications. Fascinating. After reading dozens of applications you can begin to see patterns emerging. I’m …
An imagined town is at least as real as an actual town.
Laudable! Let's take a look at some of the changes that arise from this, through a simple case study: making an international phone call to a relative. Before abolishing time zones I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there? Google tells me it is currently...
Posted on Wednesday 23 Sep 2020. 825 words, 7 links. By Matt Webb.
Cutting out the news has been one of the best lifestyle decisions I've made in recent years, second only to cutting out social media (though the two are not mutually exclusive). Reducing my intake of what is essentially junk information has significantly reduced anxiety and worry in my day to day life, and has freed…
On volcanoes, crises, and what we can learn from Icelanders
The fixed point of Y Combinator
Or, why you should read "Gravity’s Rainbow" fifty years later.
TikTok culture can be incredibly toxic, but those on the left refuse to ever condemn it for fear of echoing conservatives
Then Life Continued
