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Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 387 posts.
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How We Got Sal (KhanAcademy.org) His Dot Com
Update 6/22… It’s 12 years later and I just recently was able to get KhanAcademy.net and KhanAcademy.us to the folks at Khan Academy! It’s great to be able to support my favorite non-profits in a meaningful way. If you’re into domains and watching the drop, add a few of your favorite non-profits to your monitor list…
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IPad thoughts from Ben Fry (creator of Processing)
I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts about the iPad and the direction that Apple is taking computing along with it. It’s really an extension of the way they look at the iPhone, which I found unsettling at the time but with the iPad, we’re all finally coming around to the idea that they really, really mean it.
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How to Draw An Owl
One interpretation of the image and caption is that it reinforces how some folks perceive the progression from novice to expert: Stage 1: You suck. Stage 2: You're an expert. In fact, masterin…
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Don’t bite the shit sandwich
The “startup” world is bursting with bullshit (or, if you prefer, ‘unicorn dust’). There are bullshit peddlers on every blog-corner. They don’t want
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Data visualization - 9 Years of Sleep
For the last ten years or so, I used to turn on my PC when I came home from school or work and shut it down again right before I went to bed. So most of the time when my PC is running, I'm awake. I've also been idling in IRC for as long as I had Internet – when my PC is running, so is my IRC client.
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Homeless Experiment
On Thursday June 4 th of 2009 I left the comforts of my home in Austin, TX. with no food, no money and no place to stay for 5 days and 4 nights. I did this voluntarily as a small experiment to see what it was like to live on the streets of Austin, TX.
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Peter Martin: Google does something really good.
Rarely has one single decision done so much good. From now on when you type in the word "suicide" you get this: That's right. The Lif...
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8 [Startup] Things I’m Better At Now That I’m 30
When you’re 21 years old and working on your first startup, you’re convinced that you’re so much smarter than everyone who tried this before you. You don’t need advice or he…
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Puppy (or, details on Joel Spolsky's retirement from blogging)
At right, a picture of Taco, a ten-week-old siberian husky puppy who moved in with us last week! Some of you may have seen my final column in Inc., in which I announce my retirement from blogging …
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Richard Stallman: "I Wished I Had Killed Myself"
I received a review copy of Steven Levy's seminal book Hackers back in the 1980s, but never read it. I did, though, keep it, because it lo...
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If you put your hand in the Large Hadron Collider...
Several physicists weigh in on what would happen if you were to place your hand in the proton stream of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. There’s not a definit
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Your Worst Enemy Is Yourself
One mistake I see startups make a lot is getting too focused on what is going on around them. They spend too much time trying to figure out what their competitors are going to do. They watch the next hot startup with jealousy and it reminds them of when they were that "shiny new thing" […]
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How I write and time-manage
I was asked a few times by some very nice people at WWDC this week how I manage my time between Instapaper and Tumblr, and how I write essays here that occasionally make sense. If you’ll forgive my auto-back-patting, here’s the answer I gave, and I think it’s worth sharing with you because you can do the same sort of…
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A bad workman blames his tools
One of the most depressing things about being a programmer is the realization that your time is not entirely spent creating new and exciting...
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Mathematically correct but psychologically wrong
The snowball strategy says to pay off your smallest debt first, then the next smallest, and so on until you're out of debt. When I first heard of this I thought it was silly. Clearly the optimal strategy is to pay off the debt with the highest interest rate first. That assessment is mathematically correct,
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Anatomy of a Noob - Why your Mom Suck at Computers
Essays by Thomas Petersen
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Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
Even though I’m writing this blog in English, I know I have a considerable number of readers in non-English-speaking countries, such as my native Poland. This post is for them. If you are American, British, Australian, New Zealand(ish?) Kiwi — sorry, there’s nothing for you here. See you next week.