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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 715 posts.
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Donald Knuth – The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves (2017)
In 2015, I gave a talk in which I called Donald Knuth the Patron Saint of Yak Shaves . The reason is that Donald Knuth achieved the most perfect and long-running yak shave: TeX.
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What if we talked about over-60s’ screen time as we talk about young people’s?
In recent weeks this post has gone viral through several newsletters and aggregator sites, for all the wrong reasons. It has been rather bizarre to see people taking a post which is, and only ever was, about specific issues involving UK digital regulation and surveillance capitalism in the UK’s specific political and…
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Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)
I recently discovered a simple step-by-step process that significantly increased my personal productivity and made me happier along the way.
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An Account of the Shanghai Lockdown
Mandarin version by Misaka Clover | Japanese version The first time I came to Shanghai, in 2017, I was amazed by how developed the city was. My only other Asian experience was Mumbai, and compared to that, Shanghai was clean and organized. I was amazed by how you could pay for a laundrette with […]
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How to Walk (12 miles a day)
Little tips for walking a lot
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How To Do Less
You probably need to do fewer things right now. Prioritization, the other definition There’s two loose definitions of prioritization. Prioritization(1): Ordering a todo list. You make a giant list of things you could do, things you should do, things you’d like to do… and then you put a unique number...
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Everything must be paid for twice
One financial lesson they should teach in school is that most of the things we buy have to be paid for twice. There’...
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From novice to master, and back again (2013)
In 1985, I was a freshman at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. The college had a VAX 11/780 running 4.2BSD and a PDP-11/70 running v7 with some Berkeley and local code hacked in. It was my first exper…
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Compound pejoratives on Reddit
What can Reddit comment data tell us about the rules governing the formation of insulting compound words like 'fartface', 'scumwad', or 'assgoblin'?
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The Joy of Small Projects
When was the last time you completed a project? When was the last time you started a project? Have you every felt that you were trapped working on something that you don’t enjoy anymore? Size is something that I’m sure most developers with the drive to do side projects have felt. Recently I have been completing more…
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iPhones and action discoverability
Discoverability I spend a lot of my time thinking about UX and design, and I try to consciously think about it in the wild when I can. One of the things that always catches my eyes is the idea of discoverability, or how a user is able to discover that action X does some thing Y. A basic way to do so is to rely on…
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I've used all the notebooks
I jot, doodle, scribe, and scribble in several notebooks every day—it’s how I do my thinking.
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Considered "18+"
Vodafone UK has taken it on themselves to make the world better by marking this website (daniel.haxx.se) "adult content". I suppose in order to protect the children. It was first reported to me on May 2, with this screenshot from a Vodafone customer: And later followed up with some more details from another user in ……
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When everything is important but nothing is getting done
A step by step guide for solving a difficult organizational problem, including notes on single stack ranks, team interdependencies, building consensus, reducing work in progress, and how to move your company towards better priority management.
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2021 Letter
Getting worse and getting better; Jesuits; common prosperity; Rossini's glittering realm; slow-casual chains; Lem's ocean; vowelsongs.
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Intellectual Loneliness
I have a confession to make: I leave most parties early because I'd rather read a book. The world comes to life when I'm surrounded by ideas.
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Old jokes
That’s what she said, a rabbi resolves a dispute, and six categories in the Philogelos
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I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012
How trying out new laptops and messing with my personal computing setup motivated me to go back to a laptop that some would call ancient.
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I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code
Or a clickbait title: How I became the world’s most prolific DJ, using code.This week I stumbled across a cool project: All The Music.Damien Riehl (programm...
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Apple Music is the most buggy and annoying software I use
There is no other software that I use and pay for that can compare to Apple Music when it comes to severe bugs and annoyances. The worst of the Apple Music clients is that on macOS.
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Don’t point out something wrong immediately
This is not a post on a technical topic, but rather on a common pitfall for engineers – we like to point out something wrong the moment we see it. Understandably, we are very good at it. We are basically trained for it. When it comes to code reviews, or design reviews for complicated distributed system protocols, we…
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