Topics /

Life, Learning & Writing

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

Any year
5551

Knuth versus Email (1999)

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

5557

Running Dropbox affiliate ads cost me my Adwords account

i dont really get it... did you actually create multiple account? did you redeem multiple adwords credit coupons? what exactly did you do? or were there just other people with the same idea so there were multiple adwords accounts advertising dropbox? if the latter: would it be possible to get other advertisers banned…

5558

Clinging Desperately to a Metaphor (2011)

September 2011 Unless the people benefit, economic growth is a subsidy for the rich. —Richard Falk, “Post-Mubarak Revolutionary Chances,” Al Jazeera , 22 Feb. 2011 It’s as silly for me to write about economics as it would be for most economists to write about the use of enjambment in iambic p

5559

0xF Rules

I have been writing articles on this website for twelve years. If you were to look at the early versions , you would think it is a fresh-out-of-school project with icons drawn in Microsoft Paint. And that is exactly what it was. The site started in a world before smartphones and tablets at a time where Apple products…

5564

Covers as a way of learning music and code

When you're just getting started with music, you have so many skills to learn. You have to be able to play your instrument and express yourself through it. You need to know the style you're playing, and its idioms and conventions. You may want to record your music, and need all the skills that come along with it.

5566

I've mostly stopped reading technical mailing lists

You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…

5568

I Can't Sleep

I can't sleep. I'm lying in bed every night, and images of Gaza are running through my head. Fathers holding their babies, dead, caked in dust. Bombs dropped on homes [1], on hospitals [2], on schools [3]. Tens of thousands of dead [4] in indiscriminate bombings [5]. Children

5569

Time spent programming is often time well spent

I concur so strongly not only because he writes about RSS, which I'm on record as supporting and using. I enjoy rolling my own simple software in almost any domain. Simple has a lot of advantages. Under my control has a lot of advantages. But the biggest advantage echoes what Dr. Drang says: Programming is often more…

5575

The Fedora 45 Sausage Factory

This is a walkthrough of how Fedora turns source code and packages into the artifacts you download and install. It follows the a package from a packager’s git push to a composed release: ISOs, cloud images, container images, and OSTree deployments.

5576

Don't give bullshit advice

I chatted with a young guy last night about his new startup idea. He’s got a vision for a social commerce app with a few cool spins on it. As I listened to him, I was thinking about how I had heard this exact pitch half a dozen times before. I also knew I had a lot to offer him in terms of help. I have a good friend…

5577

Hours

A novelist friend introduced me to a productivity technique I’ve found effective. I spread it to my friends, and now to my horror management types have discovered it. A friend just told me he…