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Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,741 posts.

Any year
1835

Cleaning My MacBook After 16800 Hours of Use

I estimated that I had used my mac for approximately 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, 48 weeks a year, for 7 years straight, for a total for whopping 16800 hours. I have written the first versions of most of the software components of my startup using this computer. And all this time, this machine worked without a…

1836

Making peace with your unlived dreams (2023)

I will never be a great snowboarder. For various genetic and non-genetic reasons, my knees are barely capable of surviving a three-hour hike, let alone the landing after a 1080. In fact, I’ll probably never be a snowboarder at all, given my orthopedist told me to stay away from anything that’s heavy on the knees, […]

1837

How to Get Good at Chess, Fast

Edit: This article on chess improvement was unexpectedly popular, reaching #2 on Hacker News and being linked to on LifeHacker. Thanks for your patience as I work through all the comments and emails I receive. There are many misconceptions about rapid chess improvement. In this post I’m going to lay out a simple but…

1842

Dangerous Gift

A friend of mine pinged me online, said “Hey, remember that thing we were talking about doing a couple years ago? I still have one of the domain names, gonna let it go unless you want it.”

1850

Perfume reviews

Discussion of dabbling in samplers of ‘avant-garde’ perfumes and other perfumes; what I liked and did not like, and what 2 perfumes I ultimately bought for myself (Acqua di Sale and Kyoto Incense).

1851

Getting my library cards onto my phone the hard way

Our local libraries, The Seattle Public Library and the King County Library System, issue pieces of plastic with barcodes printed on the back assigned to your borrower account. These cards are not strictly necessary in 2023; most everything at Seattle libraries is self-service, including circulation, and these…

1852

Stop Ruining It

Paul McGowan makes stereos. To paraphrase his insight: The musicality isn’t a feature you add to an amplifier. It’s what’s left when you stop ruining it. To expand: Customer delig…

1860

You did no fact checking, and I must scream

I'm neither a journalist nor a professional fact checker but, the thing is, it's has never been easier to check basic facts. Yeah, sure, there's a world of misinformation out there, but it doesn't take much effort to determine if something is likely to be true. There are brilliant tools like reverse Image Search which…