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Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 462 posts.

2012
371

Airship Tails

Our team at Google got the opportunity to fly in a Zeppelin yesterday. This is the first Zeppelin to fly in the US since the Hindenburg. I had been looking forward to this flight for several years. The photos are spectacular.

376

Lean into the pain

When you first begin to exercise, it’s somewhat painful. Not wildly painful, like touching a hot stove, but enough that if your only goal was to avoid pain, you certainly would stop doing it. But if you keep exercising… well, it just keeps getting more painful. When you’re done, if you’ve really pushed yourself, you…

377

On Anonymity

Yesterday I encountered a blog whose comment section wasn’t linked up with Facebook or Disqus. It was just a pure email/display name system from years past – one where no one had any interest in tracking your activity across the entire interwebs. Putting in a display name that maybe wasn’t your full name – first and…

379

Why I learned to "make things"

Two years ago this week, I started working at 37signals. I couldn’t make a web app to find my way out of a paper bag. When I started working here, my technical skills were in tools like Excel, R, and Matlab, and I could muddle my way through SQL queries. I had the basic technical skills tha…

384

A brief guide to Tech Internships for CS students

Planning to be an Intern in the Bay Area during Summer 2012? Make sure to read an Intern's Guide to the Bay Area, and join the 2012 Facebook group. (via this guy, via this guy)Joel Spolsky, from the Joel On Software blog and StackOverflow, wrote an article with Advice for Computer Science College Students back in '05…

387

Two Things

[UPDATE, added 15 June 2004: This page has been linked in some prominent places recently, and as a result I've received many submissions for inclusion in The Two Things List. Although I can't respond to everyone individually, I want to thank you all for your contributions. I hope that I will be able to update the list…

389

I Have No Idea [Why Apple Featured My App]

In early December, 2011, I was both surprised and flattered to discover that Apple had named Halftone as one of the best photo apps in its App Store Rewind 2011 . Since then, I’ve received a lot of e-mail asking me how I did it. That is, what did I do to “get” Apple to pick Halftone? I don’t know what kind of response…