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Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,744 posts.

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5461

The disappearing inventor

Mark Bolas , a professor at USC, an astonishingly prolific innovator, has invented or co-invented many things. One of those things was FOV2GO, an ingenious way to make a very inexpensive, very wide angle virtual reality display.

5462

Learn to code like it's 1996

I’ve been meaning to write up my take on the learn to code movement for quite some time now, but for one reason or another haven’t managed to get around to it. Now that the president is endorsing Computer Science and telling Americans to learn to code, this post has jumped to the top of my priority list.

5464

Coding backwards

For a while I’ve wanted to write some personal finance software. Call me crazy, but I can’t find anything currently in existence that allows me to project my earnings and expenses 1 , then summarizes the net effect over a period of time. Basically, I want to be able to propose a budget to myself and simulate how it…

5468

Smart People should do Stupid Stuff

I was fortunate to attend Olin College of Engineering with some of the brightest minds in the country, and the bar of achievement was set high. Inside the classroom, we worked on problems that were mind-numbingly complex and intricate. Outside of class, most students aimed to develop incredibly elaborate and…

5469

Analyzing Last.fm Listening History

Last.fm is a web site that tracks your music listening history across devices (computer, phone, iPod, etc) and services (Spotify, iTunes, Google Play, etc). I’ve been using Last.fm for nearly 10 years now, and my tracked listening history goes back even further when you consider all my pre-existing iTunes play counts…

5472

A principled way to solve problems

Today I’m writing some short thoughts on how to design solutions or decide on actions when you face a new problem. TL;DR constantly ask yourself what you are trying to do. One of the main lessons I’ve learned in this short time working in research (as an intern), is to be methodological. Especially when you are doing…

5478

Spatial Audio

I got the following e-mail from a producer/engineer: “I just want to try and alert you to the potential seismic scam happening with this Atmos roll out. Â Atmos catalog remixing is being done…

5486

Tarsnap is cozy

I have been aware of tarsnap for a long time, but only recently did I actually get around to using it for anything, as a result of my big personal digital resiliency audit for 2025. For those of you not in the know, tarsnap is “online backups for the truly paranoid”, and tarsnap the command-line program is the…