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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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Revisiting Minsky's Society of Mind in 2025
AI Agents, Modularity, and Alignment
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Nonograms: a practical guide with interactive examples
This is a very important technique: only fill cells when you’re certain; no guessing.
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The cult of busy
When I was young I thought busy people were more important than everyone else. Otherwise, why would they be so busy? I had busy parents and busy bosses, and I assumed they must always have importan…
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Taking a Break
My year at Figma.
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Mimetic Traps
I’ve been a graduate student in physics for almost three years, but I only recently figured out why. I had to tackle a simple question do so:
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How to find your blind spots
You probably aren't qualified to dissect your own failures because you're the idiot who screwed everything up.
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Content, Forever
Got some time to kill and want to read a meandering essay by an algorithm with a short attention span? Tell us how many minutes you want to spend reading and a starting topic, and we'll whip something up.
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No, I’ll tell you the answer
Beware of advice that tries to change who you are. True wisdom guides you to a better version of yourself.
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Never Stop Hacking
A short note to myself: what makes programming fun isn't finishing tasks, it's the problems themselves and the process of learning. Never stop hacking.
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Obliterate Startup Depression
One of my favorite parts of the startup community is that we generally all acknowledge that we’re not playing a zero sum game. We create value by creating new markets and disrupting old, inefficient markets. Sure, we compete against each other as well, but in general, the communal spirit of entrepreneurship is a…
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5-HTTLPR: A Pointed Review
In 1996, some researchers discovered that depressed people often had an unusual version of the serotonin transporter gene 5-HTTLPR. The study became a psychiatric sensation, getting thousands of ci…
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It matters how you raise your kids
To parents besieged by expert advice, a new scientific idea offers relief: it’s no big deal how you raise your children....
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“That Won't Work”
Imagine the scene: Several people are discussing a problem that needs an urgent solution. Everyone is deep in thought, and one person proposes a solution. “We could…” and everyone listens intently. As soon as the person is done talking, or perhaps even before, somebody speaks up. “That won’t work!” he says. The…
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You are what you love
Discussing the importance of working alongside your emotions and not against them
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T-Shaped People and Academia
Being on the lookout for recruiting new students for my new research group , I wanted to distil some of my observations into textual form. This post deals with my impression that academia is doing a disservice to ‘T-shaped persons,’ i.e. persons combining deep expertise in one or more fields with an ability to…
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I don't like curved displays
where my words occasionally escape /dev/null
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Why Haters Hate: Kierkegaard Explains the Psychology of Trolling in 1847
“Showing that they don’t care about me, or caring that I should know they don’t care about me, still denotes dependence.”
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$450 for a School Bag?
Every year, around March, a curious social custom occurs in Japanese families. Parents of kids entering elementary school visit the grandparents and gingerly tread the topic of buying the kids a very expensive item: a randoseru. And gingerly they must tread. The randoseru, a Japanese school bag, costs a whopping
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Functional Programming Self-Affirmations
Dmitrii Kovanikov writes posts about enterprise software development and functional programming, both entertaining and serious. I never used a functional programming language (such as Haskell or OCaml) at work, but several ideas from functional programming have become popular in mainstream general-purpose programming…
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How necessary are the programming fundamentals?
I feel like there's a lot of misinformation around this topic and I've been hoping I could address that in a way that could be convincing even for those who can't stand hearing the word
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Building a walking routine
The Curiosity Chronicle has quickly become one of the most popular newsletters for growth-minded individuals in the world. Each week, subscribers receive a deep dive that covers topics ranging from growth and decision-making to business, finance, startups, and technology. In addition, subscribers receive The Friday…
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How I optimised my life to make my job redundant
If you’re a regular reader, you may have noticed a rather major job change on my behalf [https://www.troyhunt.com/2015/05/so-dust-has-finally-settled.html] recently. The day to day office grind has gone and corporate life is now well and truly behind me, where