5521
The Four Levels of Social Entrapment
One of the most difficult aspects of interacting with other people is figuring out how to extricate yourself from a conversation without app...
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,937 posts.
5522
Air-dried vs. Kiln-dried Wood
Are they different to saw, chisel and plane? Does it matter?
5523
5524
Things I wish I knew the day I started Berklee
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
5525
Fake Fans
into the digital marketing agency that creates your music taste
5526
A Text Renaissance
There is a renaissance underway in online text as a medium. The Four Horsemen of this emerging Textopia are: Roam , a hypertext publishing platform best…
5527
Pursuing a Business I'll Love
Two of my businesses had record-setting months, and I’m finally building the app I’ve always wanted.
5528
Notes on San Marino
I spent three days in San Marino, a landlocked microstate completely surrounded by Italy. The people of San Marino are called the “Sammarinese.”
5529
Book Review: The Programmer's Brain
There are some books which make you feel smarter just by having them on your shelf. This is one of them! I would consider it essential for anyone working with code - whether a wide-eyed newbie or grizzled veteran. How do human brains understand code? What neurological quirks do we all have? Which common mistakes can…
5530
Experts often end up where they started as beginners
Experts often end up where they started as beginners. If you've never seen the word valet, you might pronounce it like VAL-it. If you realize the word has a French origin, you would pronounce it val-A. But the preferred pronunciation is actually VAL-it. Beginning musicians play by ear, to the extent that they can play
5531
5532
5533
5534
Bored people quit (2011)
Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It's written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don't ha
5535
Effective learning: Rules of formulating knowledge (1999)
This article will help you overcome one of the greatest difficulties you will face when trying to accelerate learning: formulating knowledge.
5536
Book Review: The Laws of Trading
Finalist #10 in the Book Review Contest
5537
5538
5539
Clever ideas that failed (2010)
The cleverness of an idea is proportionate to its odds of failure. Brian Kernighan once said that “debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” I have built many things that I wasn’t…
5540
5541
Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?
I got a very earnest and well-phrased email from a young person overseas ...
5542
On Being Disappeared
The entire archive of six years of my show On Contact has been disappeared from YouTube.
5543
How and why I transitioned to Linux, and how you can too
First published Jan. 17, 2019; updated Nov. 15, 2019 Let me briefly tell my Linux story. If you're thinking about moving to Linux, and wondering how you'd do so, it might give you some pointers and inspiration. The back story My first introduction to the command line was in the 80s when I f
5544
In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games
This article is supported by my Patreon. If you like what you see, please consider contributing. I feel like hard counters get a bad rap in RTS games. There are a lot of arguments out there both fo…
5545
German expressions that don’t exist in English
The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” I wonder if he would have said so if his native language wasn’t German. Whether one agrees with it or not (I personally would do so partially!), there’s some modern neuroscience that backs important portions…
5546
Shooting down ideas is not a skill
Criticism can prevent mistakes. It can never create value. Only ideas can do that. The two are not equal contributions, and most meetings get this backwards.
5547
After Math
[This is a guest post by Silvia De Toffoli and Eamon Duede. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Silvia De Toffoli (University School …
5548
Why Life Can’t Be Simpler
We’d all like life to be simpler. But we also don’t want to sacrifice our options and capabilities. Tesler’s law of the conservation of complexity, a rule from design, explains why we can’t have both. Here’s how the law can help us create better products and services by rethinking simplicity.
5549
Shallow water is dangerous too
Content warning: risk to children Julia and I know drowning is the biggest risk to US kids 1-4, and we try to take this seriously. But yesterday our 4yo came very close to drowning in a fountain. (She's fine now.) This week we were on vacation with my extended family: nine kids, eight parents, and ten…
5550
Waffle House's Magic Marker System
I thought for sure that I’d previously written about the secret jelly packet & pickle-based system that chefs at the Waffle House use to “store” all of the orde