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When feedback is not a gift
Feedback is the lifeblood of getting better, but be careful who you accept feedback from.
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,746 posts.
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Chronic mania and persistent euphoric states
Can a human be happy all the time?
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Why aren’t you more serious?
Feedback about random posts and sporadic seriousness.
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The rabbit hole of adding grain to digital photos
If you don’t know already, I’m the kind of photographer who loves a lot of grain in my photos. I like it so much that I’ve made several videos about
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Guitar Decomposed: 5. Mutating the Third
So far we’ve been discussing chord transformations that didn’t change the chord’s function. We’ve been essentially dealing with just one major chord and its transpositions. …
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What I learned using private LLMs to write an undergraduate history essay
I used private and public LLMs to answer an undergraduate essay question I spent a week working on nearly 30 years ago, in an effort to see how the experience would have changed in that time. There were two rules:
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How to manually merge two Apple IDs to one (2020)
Since 2020 is made for pain, I decided to make some big moves that I have been putting off for a while. The email migration took a while, but the new setup is so much better. My reliance on Google as a company is very minimal now. I am very
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Lessons from Owning a Bookstore
I’ve done some crazy things in my life, but as I’ve said, the absolute craziest was deciding to open a bookstore. Running a small business is always difficult, running a small business during a pandemic is damn near impossible but a small town book store in rural Texas? But here we are, a year later, not just still…
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You can't reach the brain through the ears
Why do we have to learn everything the hard way?
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Ergonomic keyboarding with the Svalboard: a half-year retrospective
E ven before I started pressing buttons for a living I was always a pretty heavy computer user. When I was about 18 I started experiencing symptoms of RSI. At around the same time I learnt of the Dvorak keyboard layout, and so I switched, hoping it would solve my problems. It did, at least at the time, and so for the…
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Not as famous as they should be (2021)
Some people in computing are famous, some are not. Sometimes the fame is proportional to their contributions to computing, sometimes it's not. That's how life and the world works: the winners write the history. Financial success and personal charisma are often deemed more interesting than quietly doing your work…
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Reading English from 1000 AD
The past was not as foreign as we think.
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My Life Countdown (2007)
When I was about 29 years old I got a spiritual “assignment” on an Easter morning in the old city of Jerusalem. According to this assignment my job was to live as if I had only 6 months left to … Continue reading →
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Ouch
Back to: Did somebody just try to buy the British government? | Forward to: In case you were wondering ...
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Put it on the crazy pile: Ideas and creativity
Being an academic, I am (sort of) being paid 1 to come up with new ideas about my research field, potential applications, and the future. When I was just starting out, one of my fears was that I would not be able to come up with sufficiently good ideas. All my professors had these great ideas—would I ever be at their…
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You should feel pain when unclear
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.
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Tools for a Culture of Writing (2021)
A set of useful tools for cultivating a culture of writing, namely the RFC, the Decision Record and Decision Log, and the Pre-mortem/Prospective and Post-mortem/Retrospective
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Learn, Reflect, Apply, Prepare: The Four Daily Practices That Changed How I Live
The Four Daily Practices That Changed How I Live and Work
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Love Your Bugs
In early October I gave a keynote at Python Brasil in Belo Horizonte. Here is an aspirational and lightly edited transcript of the talk. There is …
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How to Write a Technical Book
Are you particularly well versed in a field? Why not write a book? I've summarized the 4 main steps to writing and publishing your first technical book.
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Lessons learned from bringing promotional sweets to a conference
I've recently set up my own consultancy company and decided to sponsor my local UKGovCamp conference. That entitled me to a logo on the site, a shout-out during the conference, and place to put any promotional stickers. Everyone loves stickers! But I decided to bring along something different - promotional sweeties! I…