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Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,745 posts.

Any year
5827

The story of Max, a real programmer

This is a story about Imagebin. Imagebin is the longest-lived software project that I still maintain. I'm the only user. I use it to host images, mainly to include in my blog, sometimes for sharing in other places. Imagebin's oldest changelog entry is dated May 2010, but I know it had already existed for about a year…

5831

A Life Offline

I have literally had a computer since birth; the Internet came not long after that: I still remember email addresses supplemented by UUCP bang-paths. Hardly a day has gone by in which I haven’t checked my email for what must be a decade.

5836

The Myth of the Objective

A young but earnest Zen student approached his teacher, and asked the Zen Master: "If I work very hard and diligent how long will it take for me to find Zen." The Master thought about this, then replied, "Ten years." The student then said, "But what if I work very, very hard and really apply myself to learn fast — How…

5843

Feynman's Garden

The best description of my problem solving process is the Feynman algorithm, which is sometimes presented as a joke where the hidden subtext is “be smart”, but I disagree. The “algorithm” is a surprisingly lucid description of how thinking works in the context of hard problems where the answer can’t simply be looked…

5848

On Writing Well

Writing a technical document is surprisingly hard. That is not because of the skill to tell a story. It’s because writing forces a level of clarity that is easy to gloss over while thinking through a topic.

5849

Meditations

Last year I started reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius 1 . While I was reading it, I was struck at how many of the entries were just simple reminders to himself. Don't get mad at people unnecessarily. Remember that you are just one of many. Don't get distracted.