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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 285 posts.
The best teacher I had in graduate school spent the whole semester destroying any beliefs we had about computing. He was a real iconoclast. He happened to be a genius, so we took it. At the end of the course, we were free because we didn't believe in anything. We had to learn everything, but then he destroyed it. He…
Discover what Hunter S. Thompson's letter on finding your purpose, revisited today, teaches about choosing a way of life over chasing any fixed goal.
I am an indie iPhone developer, and I’ve been working for 3 hours everyday for almost 2 years now. It may not work for everybody, but I started this habit in early 2014, and I have continued to do it since have I found that this is the most productive way to work for me.
As a kid, I'd always wonder what it was about adults that made them so busy. What could they be possibly doing with all their time? After I (kinda) became one, it hit me. There's an alarmingly large list of things adults do that we never quite grasp until we're there.
You may one day find yourself in a position where you’re eager to work on a startup but limited by the amount of time you can put into it due to a day job, family or other obligations. In this post…
The other day I set up a new OpenBSD instance with a nice RAID array, encrypted with Full Disk Encryption. And promptly proceeded to forget part of the passphrase.
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
Commentary on How to Write Articles and Essays Quickly and Expertly by Stephen Downes. Online learning, e-learning, new media, connectivism, MOOCs, personal learning environments, new literacy, and more
Over the past few years, ever since writing “If Susan Can Learn Physics So Can You,” I've been contacted by people from all backgrounds who are inspired and want to learn physics, but don't know where to start, what to learn, what to read, and how to structure their studies...this post is a condense
I’m one. We’re not exactly common on the ground; my profession, apparently not content with having excluded a whole gender, is mostly doing without the services of a couple of generations.
AdamW on Linux and more
A collection of photos from my trip to North Korea, with historical context.
The most common question students have about mathematics is “when will I ever use this?” Many math teachers would probably struggle to give…
This should be a hard blog post to write–after all, it’s the one where I openly admit I had an emotional breakdown and saw a mental health professional–but it’s actually easy. And it’s easy because it has a good ending: facing long odds and a frustrating situation, I ended up turning everything around and getting a…
I have been learning about machine learning and deep learning (ML/DL) for the last year. I think ML/DL is here to stay. I don't think this i...
If it hurts to type you’ll have a much harder time working as a programmer. Yes, there’s voice recognition, but it’s just not the same. So when my wrist and arm pain returned soon after starting a new job I was starting to get a little scared. The last two times this happened I’d had to take months and then years off…
Notes on nootropics I tried, and my experiments
Back in December I got a desperate email from this person. A woman who said her Instagram had been hacked and since she found my contact info in the app she mailed me and asked for help. I of course replied and said that I have nothing to do with her being hacked but I … Continue reading “Subject: Urgent Warning” →
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
HEY NEWS-YCOMBINATOR , I think you're looking for my articles explaining electricity. This is the 1989 page of raw unedited notes NOT A FRIGGIN' ARTICLE!!! You're all critiquing a wad of crap written on napkins, while not actually reading any of the finished articles. WHY?! Perhaps try these instead: ...
