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Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 517 posts.

2020
36

Writing a book: is it worth it?

My book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications , recently passed the milestone of 100,000 copies sold. Last year, it was the second-best-selling book in O’Reilly’s entire catalogue, second only to Aurélien Géron’s machine learning book . Machine learning is obviously a hot topic, so I am quite content with coming…

39

Why I Keep a Research Blog

Before I started taking writing seriously, I had a loose grasp of many mathematical and technical concepts; and I was not sure how to tackle open-ended problems. Maintaining this research blog has clarified my thoughts and improved how I approach research problems. The goal of this post is to explain why I have found…

48

A Guy Walks into an Apple Store

"Hello, I'd like to buy one of the new iPhones, please!" "Sure thing, here's the new iPhone 12. It's fast, beautiful, and is generally awesome." "Sweet, I'll take it. This box is really small." "Yup, that's because Apple is making the environmental move to reduce

50

I built a lay-down desk

After spending part of the last 12 months travelling in Europe I'm now settling down around Paris and I need to adapt my multi-screens setup. You probably have seen an ads for the altwork desk a $7000 desk that let you work laying down. Spending a big part of my …

54

PG and Jessica

A lot of people want to replicate YC in some other industry or some other place or with some other strategy. In general, people seem to assume that: 1) although there was some degree of mystery or...