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Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,937 posts.

Any year
4562

Ego Death

Social media aggravates the ego. Virtuous content drifts to the extremes and becomes counter productive at scale. Focusing on external validation is futile and robs the soul of a deeper meaning.

4568

Why it's great to write blog posts

I’ve been blogging for close to four years now. I started blogging because I wanted to pick up a new skill (writing) and challenge myself to do something new. Because I blog about what is both my work and hobby - software development and more specifically, cloud/platform engineering - it’s relatively simple to come up…

4571

Pee If You Want to Go Deeper (2021)

While I’m usually blogging about triathlon, today I want to discuss one of my other hobbies, scuba diving. Diving in the UK usually requires diving in a dry suit (not always, but trust me, it’s a LOT more comfortable). One of the biggest concerns that many have is about how to deal with the bladder

4579

Hellbanned from Hacker News

Yesterday I submitted a post on Hacker News out of frustration at moderators pedantically changing post titles. After quickly rising to the number two spot on the front page with 482 points and 37 comments, the post was deleted by a moderator, presumably the operator of the site, Paul Graham.

4580

Worldbuilding

There is a grand tradition of scientifically minded science fiction authors creating not just the characters in their novels but also the brass tacks scientific details of the planets they reside on. This is the art and science of Worldbuilding .

4581

“Working Too Hard And Not Getting Anywhere”

Continuing the case method on MBA Mondays, I am going to tell a story about a business model pivot that was not a full business pivot. In the lull between Flatiron and Union Square Ventures, I made a few angel investments and the best one was in a company called TACODA that went on to […]

4587

Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

I’ve been surprised by - and enjoy - one aspect of using large language models more than any other. They often put into words things I have long understood, but could not write down clearly. When that happens, it feels less like learning something new and more like recognition. A kind of “ok, yeah" moment.…

4588

Job loss and cortisone mania

On the morning of 18th August, I got invited at short notice into a 1:1 meeting by my manager, which was unusual . I think I knew what was coming, and I was right: The company is restructuring, and I’m being let go (among a lot of other people). I had time until lunch to say my goodbyes to my colleagues as I would be…

4589

Languages I want to write

I spent this weekend writing a Forth designed for music synthesis, and it reminded me what a joy writing programming languages is! I have a big list of programming language experiments that I want to try, but it's mostly been in my head so far. Here's a living document of some of the languages I want to write.