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Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 281 posts.

2014
63

I Broke My Phone’s Screen, and It Was Awesome

So this past week has been quite a whirlwind — we wrapped up the Novena campaign and smashed all our stretch goals, concluding with over $700k raised , and I got my hair cut in a bar at midnight by none other than the skilled hands of Lenore of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories ( I blame Jake ! :). It was an…

67

Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (1992)

The first question any thoughtful person might ask when reading the title of this essay is, "Hard for whom?" A reasonable question. After all, Chinese people seem to learn it just fine. When little Chinese kids go through the "terrible twos", it's Chinese they use to drive their parents crazy, and in a few years the…

69

You Are Not Late

[Translations: Italian, Japanese, Chinese] Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 1985 when almost any dot com name you wanted was available? All words; short ones, cool ones. All you had to do was … Continue reading →

73

Mitch Hedberg and GIS

Thinking about this, I realized we could use GIS to find the number of La Quintas that are next to Denny’s. Last night after the kids were asleep, I sat down with a beer (Sierra Nevada) and figured out how I could get the data and perform the calculation.

75

Ten Years of Coding Horror

In 2007, I was offered $120,000 to buy this blog outright. I was sorely tempted, because that’s a lot of money. I had to think about it for a week. Ultimately I decided that my blog was an integral part of who I was, and who I eventually

88

PSA: Back Up Your Shit

Here in this modern world, you talk to your friends over all kinds of different media: SMS, Facebook, Twitter DMs, GChat, and maybe even AIM if you're really old. These conversations aren't ephemeral and disposable, they are your life, and you want to save them forever. You don't just throw your letters in the trash…

89

Code is not Literature

I have started code reading groups at the last two companies I’ve worked at, Etsy and Twitter, and some folks have asked for my advice about code reading and running code reading groups. Tl;dr: don’t start a code reading group. What you should start instead I’ll get to in a moment but first I need to explain how I…