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Life, Learning & Writing

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

2014
188

From Gmail to Fastmail

Email is crucial to me, I can’t even remember the last day I didn’t check my inbox. It’s my preferred channel for communicating and interacting with other people “electronically”. Like many developers I also use emails to keep track of the activity of all the projects I contribute to. I also receive all sorts of…

191

A Question

I have a question for all the people that use their iPhone or Android to complain on Twitter, Facebook, or reddit about the lack of innovation… Or message their friends on WhatsApp or Snapchat...

194

The disappearing inventor

Mark Bolas , a professor at USC, an astonishingly prolific innovator, has invented or co-invented many things. One of those things was FOV2GO, an ingenious way to make a very inexpensive, very wide angle virtual reality display.

200

Teenage Haskell

I’ve been inspired by the efforts of others (Chris Smith, Manuel Chakravarty) to try teaching children haskell as a first experience of programming. Haskell has a reputation of being a "…

202

My Experience at YC Hacks

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. At 33 years old, I knew I’d probably be older than the vast majority of the 400+ people attending Y Combinator’s first YC Hacks hackathon. But other than that, I didn’t have many expectations. YC Hacks was my first real hackathon. Many years ago, I went to the …

206

Dear Google, am I pregnant?

Here in the UK, we are a signatory to the European Convention of Human Rights, which among other things includes an explicit right to privacy (considerably stronger than the implicit privacy rights acknowledged in the US, which are not enumerated directly by the US constitution).

210

Meditations

Last year I started reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius 1 . While I was reading it, I was struck at how many of the entries were just simple reminders to himself. Don't get mad at people unnecessarily. Remember that you are just one of many. Don't get distracted.