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Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,746 posts.
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Why read old philosophy?
I’m going to try to explain a mystery that puzzled me for years. This answer finally dawned on me in the middle of one of those occasional conversations in which non-perplexed friends patiently try…
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Where to Sleep in LAX
My 11:30 pm connecting flight out of Los Angeles International Airport was delayed by 24 hours, forcing me to rest in the airport. All my bags were checked, so I had no luggage or spare clothes available. Here's where I tried sleeping and how it went.
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Programming book authors: put all the code in the book
tl;dr: programming book authors: put all the code in the book! An extreme antipattern for a programming book is “download the author’s idiosyncratic library code from some random URL an…
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Pieces of Shit
I listened to this song last night.
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My Contribution to Markdown
At long last revealed.
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The Leave
Whatever we *expected*, we all *hoped* we’d seen our last Steve Jobs medical leave.
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Stab a Book, the Book Won't Die
On the resilience of books in the face of apps, attention monsters, and an ad-driven online economy
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Unquantified
The only real valuable thing is intuition. – Albert Einstein A year ago I got rid of my scale, a simple act that turned out to be the catalyst for a year’s worth of quiet introspection and experimentation in removing quantification from my life. A year later I’m quantifiably more ignorant about myself than I have been…
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Lean into the pain
When you first begin to exercise, it’s somewhat painful. Not wildly painful, like touching a hot stove, but enough that if your only goal was to avoid pain, you certainly would stop doing it. But if you keep exercising… well, it just keeps getting more painful. When you’re done, if you’ve really pushed yourself, you…
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Running a business means contact with reality
A year ago I decided to help build a service business for my mom because I wanted to learn about marketing and business. One of the largest blindspots engineers have is around sales and marketing. I was determined to not fall into this trap, but marketing seemed like a skill I couldn’t just learn by […]
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On Anonymity
Yesterday I encountered a blog whose comment section wasn’t linked up with Facebook or Disqus. It was just a pure email/display name system from years past – one where no one had any interest in tracking your activity across the entire interwebs. Putting in a display name that maybe wasn’t your full name – first and…
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Humans Need Play
On a vicious pattern that breeds burnout.
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Entrepreneurship is hard but you can’t die
I’m posting a series of articles on family, startup culture and careers. These vignettes are about how I’ve lived my life trying to make a dent in the universe. Hoping they’ll give you a point of v…
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The Importance of Limitations for Creativity and Learning (2023)
The other day, my kids started messing around (at home) with an online document writing platform their school uses. They’d discovered a fun little easter egg. I watched them laugh and play with the feature - pushing its limits and ultimately crashing the browser.
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Patterns for Personal Web Sites (2003)
Guidelines for creating a living personal Web site.
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University of Waterloo Systems Design Engineering 2017 Class Profile
Sometimes a yearbook doesn’t quite cut it. In our final semester of university, the Systems Design Engineering class of 2017 was curious…
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The Top Shelf Principle (2019)
The Top Shelf Principle | Mo — Previously built Standard Note...
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Asterisk
Challenged to write about a single Unicode character, I chose the humble asterisk. In this post, Julia takes a back seat but it’s working hard behind the scenes. [1] The font used for the examples is JuliaMono.
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Making progress on side projects with content-driven development
It's hard to make progress on side projects sometimes. Getting started is easy when we see the bright future of the project. Then somewhere in the middle, we get stuck in lists of tasks to do, a long way in and still a long way from the finish line.
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I've Written a Book
Executive summary: I've written a book. If you like this site, you'll love the book. You can buy it printed on paper or as a DRM-free ebook on the Pragmatic Programmers website .
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Jobs Inside the API
If someone is worse at their job than a drunk person with Google, why do they still have their job?
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I'm Writing a Book on Security
I’m writing a book on security in the highly connected Internet-of-Things world. Tentative title: Click Here to Kill Everybody Peril and Promise in a Hyper-Connected World There are two underlying metaphors in the book. The first is what I have called the World-Sized Web, which is that combination of mobile, cloud…
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Switching to Windows
Around 2015, I started to realize that I was no longer part of Apple's target audience. I've since found that Windows, and the devices available on the Windows side, from gaming laptops to convertibles to custom-built PCs, are just a better match for my requirements.
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The Shamanic View of Mental Illness (2010)
Discover direct, fluff-free relationship advice, conflict resolution strategies, and insights on modern manhood from Jayson Gaddis. Build a marriage worthy of your ambition.
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Advice to a novice programmer
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus