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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 715 posts.
Recently I learned that the US government offers a little gift called I-bonds, and that this is the month to buy them. Depending on your perspective, I-bonds are either free money or the only true money storage. They're zero-risk bonds with an interest rate that always matches or exceeds inflation. The interest rate…
I’ve been on Nexuses and Pixels since Nexus one. Stock-or-nothing was me. However, the mobile phone market has become a bit stale and…
Staying in touch with people is one of these asymmetric habits that require little effort, time and resources but has an unlimited upside.
The most surprising thing is that you wouldn’t let anyone steal your property, but you consistently let people steal your time, which is infinitely more valuable.
Most Unix-ish APIs, from files to sockets are a bit of a mess today. Endless poorly documented sockopts, unexpected changes in write semantics across FSs and OSes, good luck trying to figure out mtimes . But despite the mess, I can generally wrap my head around open/read/write/close. I can strace a binary and figure…
Here are some things that I hated as a student. At the time, I thought my teachers didn’t understand or care how terrible they were.
Collaboration is amazing! There’s absolutely no trade-offs, right? The mantra of sharing your work and involving everyone in decisions naturally leads to…
I have a pornography problem, but it’s not what you’re thinking. In fact, if you’re anything like me, you might too.
The eventful tale of me getting fed up with my homework
We've got the wrong theory about how minds work and it's ruining our lives
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.
In my writing on technology and culture I try to be judicious about citing scientific studies. The issues involved in our ongoing wrangling with digital ... Read more
Imagine… Last night, lightning struck our house and burned it down. I escaped wearing only my nightclothes. In an instant, everything was vaporised. Laptop? Cinders. Phone? Ashes. Home server? A smouldering wreck. Yubikey? A charred chunk of gristle. This presents something of a problem. In order to recover my digital…
Back in December of 2016 I took a look at what the next year held in store for us. It spanned three blog posts and ended happily in a nuclear barbecue to put us all out of our misery: start here , continue with this , and finale: and the Rabid Nazi Raccoons shall inherit the Earth .
It’s been almost two years since my last update here. A lot has happened. I hope you all are continuing to weather the ongoing multiple global pandemics and other anthropogenic crises. Apolog…
Garbage in garbage out
I was listening to the Tim Ferriss Show podcast episode #532 with Sheila Heen (Harvard Negotiation Project, co-author of Difficult Conversations: How To Discuss What Matters Most) and a specific story she told during the conversation really resonated with me and I have been thinking alot about it since I heard it…
File synchronization can be fun and painless if you don’t have to deal with corporate bullshit.
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.
There is something seriously wrong with the IT industry. It's so bad that I haven't managed to find a single industry with the same massive amount of stupidity, with the exception of perhaps the fashion industry.
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.
Everyone should know why.
Good morning! The other day some friends and I were reminiscing about an app idea we had years ago that would allow you to “blind cancel” on your friends. That is—flag if you were open to canceling a plan, which would only be revealed if the other person flagged it too. Basically, it was Tinder for bailing. This was…
This is part 1. Part 2: update : U+237C ⍼ angzarr; Part 3: Monotype Mathematical Sorts Part 4: U+237C ⍼ is (also) S9576 ⍼
If you do any sort of creative digital work, screenshots and screen recordings are a great way to remember it.
A love letter to tools that changed everything for me.
