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Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 116 posts.

2008
34

Amnesia

Mysteriously, about a week ago, Dan, the program manager designing most of the new features in FogBugz 7, came to ask me what features I thought should go in the timesheet reporting plug-in. The ti…

37

NFL player IQ by position

I was reminded this morning that Mario Manningham, a wide receiver who played for Michigan was rumored to have scored a 6 (out of 50) on the Wonderlic , an intelligence test administered in some occupations (and now pro football) to check the mental capability of job candidates. Intelligence tests are strange beasts…

47

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

Why is everyone in such a rush? Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced search for [ title: teach, yourself, hours, since: 2000 and found 512 such books…

50

Soon it will be time to start over, again

A new generation of young techies comes along, takes a look at the current stack, finds it too daunting (rightly so) and decides to start over from scratch. They find that they can make things happen that the previous generation couldn't cause they were so mired in the complexity of the systems they had built. The new…

58

The One Thing in Life You Can Control: Effort

I remember the time well. I was 27 years old. I finally had my own apartment for the first time. I still hadn’t bought a new car yet, but I was jazzed that I had a 4 year old Mazda RX 7. 4 Years old was as good as new to me, and driving a gold RX 7 back in the day was fun as well.