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I hacked my washing machine
I ran out of characters for microblogging so this is where the big words go
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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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Never Missing the Train Again
How I built a transit dashboard with Rust, Skia, and an old Kindle
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A system to help you remember more of what you read
Five years ago I realized that I remembered almost nothing about most books that I read. I was reading all kinds of non-fiction - pop-psychology, pop-economics, pop-sociology, you name it - and felt like quite the polymath auto-didact. But one day, after I had finished blathering at a friend about how much I had…
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All clocks are 30 seconds late
OK, this is going to sound crazy: I believe all clocks are 30 seconds late. Let's get a few things out of the way: this is neither about time zones, nor l...
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I only use Google Sheets
To cut things short, always use the easiest solution to solve a particular problem and once that solution does not work for the business anymore reassess wha...
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The benefits of staying off social media
There are quite a few benefits of staying off social media. The main one is unplugging from the virtual prison and experiencing real life.
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No One Goes There Anymore
There's a famous Yogi Berra quote that goes: Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded. I have a serious medical condition. I don't us...
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I was tricked into thinking I had “grit”
I was tricked into thinking I had tons of grit as a student. I worked hard in school. I put in long hours. I stayed up all night reading and preparing for debate topics, doing homework, writing essays. It was easy for me to burn the midnight oil. I enjoy
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Programming languages that blew my mind (2023)
I’ve been a programmer since the age of 8, and some kind of developer for most of my life. Throughout my life as a coder, both hobbyist and professional, I’ve learnt plenty of programming languages that felt like cookie-cutter clones of each other, but also a few programming languages that changed the way I looked at…
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Van Life in Japan
As I got better experience about van life, I published a dedicated website covering tips and tricks to enjoy Japan with a van. Check Camp In Japan for more information and guide on how to enjoy Japan in a van. It’s been already 9 months and 10,000 kilometers we are living across Japan in our […]
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The Greatest Educational Life Hack: Learning Math Ahead of Time
Learning math early guards you against numerous academic risks, opens all kinds of doors to career opportunities, and allows you to enter those doors earlier in life (which in turn allows you to accomplish more over the course of your career).
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Take more screenshots (2022)
If you do any sort of creative digital work, screenshots and screen recordings are a great way to remember it.
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Textbook manifesto (2016)
Allen Downey's textbook manifesto: students should read and understand textbooks, so why are so many textbooks written as if nobody expects them to?
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A bad day at the office
While looking for something else, I came across this rather incredible photo in the Imperial War Museum collection. That's a seaplane stuck 300 feet up a 350ft tall radio mast! If that's not amazing enough, the pilot was rescued by three men who climbed up to retrieve him. And he survived.
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Ditching the MacBook Pro for a MacBook Air
I'm Brad Frost, an independent creator, web designer & developer, teacher, speaker, writer, musician, and artist based in Pittsburgh, PA.
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My Path to Financial Independence as a Software Engineer
One of the watershed moments of my life was as a 20 year old intern attending a workplace presentation about personal finance. Over the course of one hour, I learnt about the power of buy-and-hold …
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Teaching C
I was hoping you would mention the dynamic checkers, ASAN etc. My fear is people will start using these but not understand how to really use them properly. Since they’re dynamic checkers you really need a good testing harness and test cases to go with it. The bugs ASAN/TSAN etc catch are usually strange boundary…
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Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)
We’ve all sat in those presentations. A speaker with a stream of slides full of text, monotonously reading them off as we read along. We’re so used to it we expect it. We accept it. We even consider it ‘learning’. As an educator I push against ‘death by PowerPoint’ and I'm fascinated with how we
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Why are D-sharp and E-flat considered to be two different notes?
Why do the black keys on the piano each have two different names? If the posts on r/musictheory are any indication, this is a persistent point of confusion, especially when music theory teachers ge…
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Staring into the abyss as a core life skill
thinking about scary things • examples from Wave • examples from elsewhere • finding a buddy • getting the timing right • a list of abyss questions
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Joel Spolsky: Lunch
What do you do for lunch every day? Where do you eat it? With whom? I’ve been on teams that eat together every day, and it’s awesome. I’ve been on teams that don’t, and lunch every day is, at best,…
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Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
I reverse-engineered Waffle House's website to build a live version of the (unofficial) Waffle House Index, and got a cease and desist for it.
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Three constraints before I build anything
['Programmer', 'Computer nerd', 'Unix enthusiast'];
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Your phone is an entire computer
The new MacBook Neo announcement raises old questions around what rights we have (and don't have) to install software on devices we own.
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Programming: Doing it more vs. doing it better
A few years ago, very early into my programming career, I came across a story: The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left si…