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Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,934 posts.

Any year
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30 minutes a day

The simple act of reserving a tiny part of your day. Perhaps just 30 minutes. Of pure, uninterrupted focus. On the idea you want to make become reality. Will ensure at least some extent of progress. I guarantee you.

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Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

Today we released Whisk 2.0: a lightweight web page editor with a live preview that updates as you type. The name may be new, but the mac app’s origins are in shareware called HyperEdit that I started while in college over 16 years ago. It is hard to believe I’ve worked on an app old eno

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Blogger Finger

Great to see you back Steve! I'm sorry to hear about your hand troubles, and glad that there's a 95% approval rating. The interweb just got slightly better again. Welcome back.

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Cancer and Startups

About a year and a half ago, my mother’s partner was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given less than six months to live. Since then it has been treatments, pain, and truly miraculous victories - but the word “terminal” is pretty clear; at some point you will lose. I flew home as soon as things started to take a…

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Why do people leave comments on OpenBenches?

I'm still a believer in the promise of Web 2.0. The idea that giving people a curated space to chat produces tiny sparks of magic. My wife Liz and I have been running the OpenBenches project for about 8 years - it's a crowd-sourced repository of memorial benches. People take a geotagged photo of a bench's plaque…

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I Became a Citizen of Japan

I became a citizen of Japan. Let me share about it. Some is my anecdotal experience, some my opinion, and some facts. Parsing which of these is what in each sentence is not going to happen. EDIT: I have seen some online reaction to this, and appreciate your kind comments. If you are thinking abou

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GPT-3 Creative Fiction

Creative writing by OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, demonstrating poetry, dialogue, puns, literary parodies, and storytelling. Plus advice on effective GPT-3 prompt programming & avoiding common errors.