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Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,746 posts.

Any year
7448

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.

7456

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…

7458

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…

7461

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…

7469

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…