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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,740 posts.
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We're in a Golden Age for Amateur Radio
When I started my ham life as KK6VSI in August of 2015, I wish I could have had the information I'm about to lay out here. Of course, most of the equipment didn't yet exist. So another way of looking at it is that my entry into amateur radio was perfectly timed for my generation's Golden Age of Ham Radio.
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What Is a Dickover?
dickover — a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of…
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Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"
In 2000, Douglas Adams made an interesting observation that I keep returning to. A user on Slashdot named “FascDot Killed My Pr” had asked the following question (where HGttG = Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy): Comedy….or Tragedy? First, a big thank-you. You’ve made a lasting contribution to “our” culture (or should…
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You’re a slow thinker. Now what?
Figuring out how to lean in to my thinking style
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The microhydro plant
setting up a microhydro installation
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On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years
I caught the chess bug as a college student, twenty-one years old, and it’s become my favorite way to unwind since then, as I’m now working at VisioStack and starting a master’s i…
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Don’t be spooky
It’s possibly the best advice for managers I've given so …
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How to parent more predictably (2018)
(As with anything else I write about parenting, this is mostly just my observations with my own two kids and may not generalize as well as I think it does.) A few weeks ago I wrote about why I think it's valuable for parents to be predictable. I was mostly describing an end state, though, and reasons why it's a good…
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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...
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My Caste
Allow me to introduce you to one of the largest population groups in India, as recognized by the constitution of India: Other Backward Classes ( OBC Category ). OBCs are estimated to comprise 40-45% of India's population, therefore, about 500 million people belong to OBC category. In other words, 1 in 16 people in the…
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The Hunt for Dark Breakfast
With a theoretical model of breakfast, can we derive the existence of “dark breakfasts,” breakfasts that we know must exist, but have never observed?
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Don’t think to write, write to think
This is one of the lessons that every writer comes to appreciate: writing is thinking. Writing is not the artifact of thinking, it’s the actual thinking process. There’s no shortage of great quotes on this topic, the implications are less clear: Writing is the planning process and the final product: You don’t design a…
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Be wary of imitating high-status people who can afford to countersignal
Pay more attention to people who are just a little bit ahead of you
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How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
There’s a scene in Moneyball in which Brad Pitt’s character, the manager of the Oakland A’s , is watching a recording of one of his players trying so hard to run fast that he stumbles and falls. Lying on the ground he’s angry at himself, because he doesn’t realize that right before he started his run he hit a home run…
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Good software knows when to stop
Good software knows what problem it solves and what needs to be tackled by another tool
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Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels
We are products with labels
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Screw motivation, what you need is discipline
If you want to get anything done, there are two basic ways to get yourself to do it. The first, more popular and devastatingly wrong option is to try to motivate yourself. The second, somewhat unpo…
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What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard
What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard.
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Hackintosh is almost dead
While I knew about and even tried various very early attempts to run macOS on non-Apple hardware, it wasn’t until early 2020 that I’ve built my first proper one. Then I built several more which are still seeing daily use.
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A decade later, a decade lost (2024)
I woke up this morning about an hour ahead of my alarm, the sky already light, birds calling.
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Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock
I got a message from a friend today which read along the lines of "I know we were going to meet in Edinburgh today, but do you fancy meeting in Portobello instead and trying to fix the clock in the old police station with me?"
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Parable of the Sofa
When Lauren was pregnant with a child who’s now turning 25, we purchased a comfy dark-brown leather sofa which fits our living room nicely. What with kids and relatives and employees and cats and Standards Comittees and friends and book clubs and socials, the butt-support cushions had, a quarter century later, worn…