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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,746 posts.
Confessions of a Math Idiot
A blog about computers, functional languages, Lisp, and Scheme.
Lessons from the failure of Livejournal: when not to listen to your users
Your life is the best story! Just start your blog today!
Rands In Repose: The Makers of Things
In the late 1800s, the Brooklyn Bridge was built with no power tools, no heavy machinery, and only a basic, evolving understanding of how to make steel. It's no
A year with Python
Almost exactly a year ago I wrote here about giving Python a try as my main programming language. Before that I was mainly writing in Perl, and eying Ruby from time to time as the replacement.
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Why is everyone in such a rush? Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced search for [ title: teach, yourself, hours, since: 2000 and found 512 such books…
The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get
Time to stop breaking the news, and start fixing it.
A4 vs US Letter
Ever downloaded a document or received a file from a friend only to have it print out badly? There are lots of potential causes of such problems: different typefaces available to the creator and the printer; different operating systems and different versions of the same operating systems exposing limitations in…
Round manhole covers, or if Feynman applied for a job at Microsoft
All of the entries posted on Marquee de Sells: Chris's insight outlet tagged Interviewing
Tracking Down a Stolen iPhone
( Note: some screenshots are quite obviously simulated. ) ( Note 2: this is my first blog post in over three years, feel free to read my ancient history if you like. ) ( Note 3: All said and done, the comments and Internet-fame have been awesome. I'm moving on though. If you're interested, check…
Camera Hack: How to find a lost camera
Have you lost your camera recently? Mislaid it somewhere in a national park? Left it in a taxi? Dropped it in the gorilla pit? Anyone can be a victim of the thoughtlessness and/or sleepiness that can lead to Camera Loss.
Pretending to be Wise
> The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral. > > —Dante Alighieri, famous hell expert > > —John F. Kenne…
Soon it will be time to start over, again
A new generation of young techies comes along, takes a look at the current stack, finds it too daunting (rightly so) and decides to start over from scratch. They find that they can make things happen that the previous generation couldn't cause they were so mired in the complexity of the systems they had built. The new…