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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,937 posts.
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Why I left Academia: Part I
Two months before defending my dissertation, I found out that a professor had published my own work ahead of me. My story caught the attention of academics all over the world, going viral in 2017. This post is about why I left academia, and what I discovered when Post-PhD the blog went viral: that I
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From web dev to 3D: Learning 3D modeling
A few months ago I set myself the challenge to recreate this photo (shot by Masashi Wakui) By modeling it in 3d! At the end I had this (I promise no IRL cats w…
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Digital Gardening
A website is a lot like a garden.
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Writing Is Hard
Writing is hard. Especially if you start thinking. Never stop to think about what to write (unless you must), it will ruin the flow. Never stop to correct yourself, to judge or run a spellcheck. Don’t do that; that’s what editing is for. I’ve read the same tips again and again: Write first, edit later. […]
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Becoming an expert through deliberate practice
How do you become an expert? Here's an interview with the professor who created the 10,000 hours theory of expertise that will teach you how to be the best.
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Focus on your own shit (2016)
Check Product Hunt. Ahh, crap. Someone just launched an app similar to my product (and we’re still in beta).
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Teach Programming to become a better programmer
Are you bored with programming? Why not teach it. It’s not enough to speak in mumbo jumbo such as polymorphism, multithreading, typescript, blah blah these words mean nothing to people who don’t know programming.
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My hiring experience as a submarine sonar operator in the Norwegian Navy
As some of you know I spent a year on a submarine. This is the story about how that came about.
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The perfect email
As you might imagine, I get many random inbound emails. Last I checked, I was getting about 500 emails a day, and about 50 of them a day are from people I don’t know. They often ask for advice, or just want me to look at their startup for investment. This is fine, I try … Continue Reading >
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Taming Perfectionism
An article that explores the idea of imperfect beauty - taming perfectionism with the Japanese art of Wabi-sabi.
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Melting aluminum
Today another in my ongoing, seldom-updated series of posts about building my own backyard foundry. Today I’ll describe how the final step works: actually melting and pouring the metal. First…
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A Pretty Good Mathematical Model of Perfectionism
I struggle with perfectionism. Well, not so much “struggle with” — I’m f*cking great at it. It comes naturally. There are some upsides, but perfectionism is also associated …
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Four lines of code it was four lines of code
Four lines of code … it was four lines of code
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I Replaced My MacBook Pro with a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB for a Day
Earlier this week, as part of my work doing a more complete review of the Raspberry Pi 4 (coming soon!), I decided I'd go all-in and spend one entire day working entirely (or at least as much as possible) from a Raspberry Pi. And not just doing some remote coding sessions or writing a blog post—that's easy to do on a…
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Why are our brains shrinking?
As promised, here is the first post in our “The Student of Life” series. This essay, focusing on the fascinating subject of the shrinkage of our brain over the last 70,000 years, was masterfully penned by USF student Savannah Robison during the Fall 2017 semester of BIOL100. It is a wonderful example of student…
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Just use fucking paper, man
I’ve tried Notion, Obsidian, Things, Apple Reminders, Apple Notes, Jotter and endless other tools to keep me organised and sure, Notion has stuck around the most because we use it for client stuff, but for todo lists, all of the above are way too complicated. I’ve given up this week and gone back to paper […]
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Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all
The commonly-held belief that attempting to suppress negative thoughts is bad for our mental health could be wrong, a new study from scientists at the University of Cambridge suggests.
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Why we need a book about naming
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. — Martin Fowler
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Dandelion Root Recipes
Dandelion root recipes offer a variety of uses, from herbal teas to hearty dishes. Discover how to incorporate this nutritious root into your meals and remedies.
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Write less code, be more responsible
My thoughts on AI-assisted programming.
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Advice to young people, the lies I tell myself (2024)
Discover insightful advice for young people, emphasizing choices, confidence, and personal growth through lived experiences.
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I bought an encyclopedia
NOTE: This is a companion post to my piece in Public Books, "The Encylopedia Project: Or, how to know in…