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Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,745 posts.
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Farewell to MIT
I defended my Ph.D. thesis on September 7th, 2011. Technically, I'm still not done for a few complicated reasons, but at this point I am willing to declare victory and say I've graduated. Like most other major events in life, this has caused me to reflect on the past four years, when I quit my job at Google to become…
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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...
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My Experience at YC Hacks
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. At 33 years old, I knew I’d probably be older than the vast majority of the 400+ people attending Y Combinator’s first YC Hacks hackathon. But other than that, I didn’t have many expectations. YC Hacks was my first real hackathon. Many years ago, I went to the …
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Reminiscing: The retreat to comforting work
In Work on what matters, I wrote about Hunter Walk’s idea of snacking: doing work that is easy to complete but low impact. The best story of my own snacking behaviors comes from my time at Stripe. I was focused on revamping the engineering organization’s approach to operating reliable software, and decided that it…
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French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
A complete explanation of how e, è, é, ê, and ë are used in French, with rules, examples and pronunciation.
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Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal
Using your phone as a dumb terminal with a Bluetooth keyboard
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Guys, unless you are really hot you are just wasting your time on Tinder
by Worst-Online-Dater
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How I lost my backpack with passports and laptop
A tale about mixing GABAergics, neuroticism, responsibility and Heidegger
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What I Learned From Blowing An Interview
Some time ago, I was a development manager with 23 reports spread over four teams.
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Never Going Back - A Week of Not Eating Lunch at My Desk
According to a 2011 study on the subject, around 80% of us still eat lunch at our desks. I quit eating lunch at my desk and not only has it been incredibly enjoyable, I’m much more productive…
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Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers
The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic. I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal. I have a spicily optimistic take: I think there's a huge opportunity for junior engineers.
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"TLDR" is unnecessary
If you summarize your idea in your first sentence, writing "TLDR" is superfluous. The English Language already has tools to summarize and communicate your thoughts. Leverage existing conventions, which are accepted by a larger population, and you will engage more users and succeed in communicating your idea. "TLDR"…
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When or If
The CSSWG (CSS Working Group) is currently debating what to name a conditional structure, and it’s kind of fascinating.
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Why 13th Chords
As the background to my music theory is more classical in nature, it used to puzzle me when I saw jazz chords like C9, B♭11 or F13. I mean, I knew what a 9th, 11th and 13th note were but I wondered why you'd call a note a 9th rather than a 2nd, or a 13th rather than a 6th and so on.
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Hydrofoiling
I was standing on a floating dock on a Pacific-ocean inlet, a place where it’s obvious why motorboats are such an environmental disaster. Fortunately lots of other people have noticed too and it looks increasingly that more people will be able to enjoy Messing About In Boats without feeling like they’re making Greta…
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Why I'm Learning Sumerian
After burning out on a massive project, I started learning Sumerian, a language no one’s spoken in 4,000 years. What began as a useless obsession turned into a lesson on meaning, burnout, and the quiet joy of doing hard things that don’t need to matter.
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Good developers learn to program. Most courses teach a language
A bootcamp can teach you the syntax of a language in six weeks. The part that takes a decade is everything else: where the seams go, where the data flows, which decisions you are stuck with for the life of the codebase. This is a senior developer's argument for what learners should actually be looking for, after…
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Trapped priors as a basic problem of rationality
P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.
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My solar-powered blog is now on lithium iron phosphate
In my last blog post I discussed how a small solar project - to power this blog on a Raspberry Pi - escalated into a full-blown off-grid solar setup, large enough to power the computer I use at the moment to write this update 1 . In this update, I want to discuss my battery upgrade.
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Cross the world four times
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.