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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,925 posts.
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If I get hit by a truck...
This page was created by Aaron Swartz in 2003 detailing what, at the time, he would like to be performed in event of his decease. Aaron passed away in January 2013. This page was not updated between those dates, so it has now been updated to assist the general public.
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I’m a productive programmer with a memory of a fruit fly
A love letter to tools that changed everything for me.
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The Top Idea in Your Mind
July 2010 I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower. Everyone who's worked on difficult…
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Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail
In 2013, when it became clear, primarily through Edward Snowden’s heroic actions, that the level of snooping by the US and other governments was far greater than any of us would have thought, I moved all of my data out of the US and of course blogged about it (that blog post has been read almost 70000 times; I think…
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I accidentally became PureGym’s unofficial Apple Wallet developer
How I reverse-engineered PureGym's API to build a working Apple Wallet pass with PassKit, Vapor, and mitmproxy - end-to-end iOS reverse engineering walkthrough.
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Do quests, not goals
South Island, New Zealand, a.k.a. Middle-Earth If you were to...
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More German than many Germans
I just wanted to do an internship in Europe so it would be easier to find a job after graduation. That internship completely changed my life.
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Inflammation now predicts heart disease more strongly than cholesterol
The American College of Cardiology now recommends everybody measure their hs-CRP.
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“Citizenfour” Awarded Oscar for Best Documentary in 2014
CITIZENFOUR, Laura Poitras' riveting documentary about Edward Snowden's efforts to shed light on gross surveillance abuses by the United States government and its partners, just won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Tonight's Oscar win recognizes not only the incredible...
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Have attention spans been declining?
[This is one of the finalists in the SMTM Mysteries Contest, by a reader writing under the pseudonym Cennfaeladh. We’ll be posting about one of these a week until we have gotten through all th…
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Substack writers, you need a website
Substack is convenient, but treat it as a distribution tool for your content. Your content should live on an independently owned website, which has a domain name you control and own. This way, you …
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The Rise of Whatever
This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history. Let me back up a bit.
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Interview advice that got me offers
“What would you say if I asked you to design me a service capable of responding to thousands of user requests every second and latency was critical?”
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Writing a book: is it worth it?
My book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications , recently passed the milestone of 100,000 copies sold. Last year, it was the second-best-selling book in O’Reilly’s entire catalogue, second only to Aurélien Géron’s machine learning book . Machine learning is obviously a hot topic, so I am quite content with coming…
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The Hand Licking Incident
When my oldest son was seven and in second grade, we were living in Kansas. Some time after the school year started, he began licking his ha...
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Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
Have you ever accidentally caused harm to yourself or others from your code? I have.
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Eight years today
The car in front of me kept hesitating. The driver couldn't seem to decide where to turn. Up ahead I could see that the light was green, but...
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Saving Lydia
My 6 month old daughter was born with a genetic mutation that will leave her severely disabled. We can silence her mutation within months…
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They're made out of meat (1991)
Copyright, Terry Bisson, 1991 Originally published in OMNI, 1991, and featured in HARPER’S and around the internet since. It has even made its way into several books on consciousness and brain science. I’m surprised, pleased, and proud. But please do not reprint, perform, alter or adapt in any way without first…
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Be careful with that thing, it's a confidential coffee maker
Just keep it under wraps.
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Using the wrong dictionary
The way I thought you used a dictionary was that you looked up words you've never heard of, or whose sense you're unsure of. You would never look up an ordinary word -- like example , or sport , or magic -- because all you'll learn is what it means, and that you already know.
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