31
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 126 posts.
32
A Defense of Philosophy (against Paul Graham)
In How to Do Philosophy , Paul Graham claims that “judging from their works, most philosophers up to the present have been wasting their time.” His point is that philosophy per se is structurally flawed. How?
33
34
35
36
Amnesia
Mysteriously, about a week ago, Dan, the program manager designing most of the new features in FogBugz 7, came to ask me what features I thought should go in the timesheet reporting plug-in. The ti…
37
Nassim Taleb's Top 10 Life Tips
Here are Nassim Taleb’s top 10 life tips, all worthwhile, from this profile: 1. Skepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be im…
38
39
NFL player IQ by position
I was reminded this morning that Mario Manningham, a wide receiver who played for Michigan was rumored to have scored a 6 (out of 50) on the Wonderlic , an intelligence test administered in some occupations (and now pro football) to check the mental capability of job candidates. Intelligence tests are strange beasts…
40
41
42
43
What's your story? Why start Balsamiq?
News and announcements from your friends at Balsamiq.
44
"How to Get Rich": an anti-self-help book by Felix Dennis
One of the books I read whilst away in Portugal was the How to Get Rich book by Felix Dennis. I bought this book a few months ago following an Amazon
45
Black and white
So I'm pretty well-known for not exactly being a huge fan of the FSF and Richard Stallman, despite the fact that I obviously love the GPLv2 ...
46
Making Nested Parens with My Homeboy, Donald Knuth
Your life is the best story! Just start your blog today!
47
48
Optimize for now!
One of the easiest ways to shoot down good ideas, interesting policies, or worthwhile experiments is by injecting the assumption that whatever you’re doing needs to last forever and ever. Which means that the concept has to scale from 5 people to 5,000 or from 100,000 users to 100 million. Th…
49
Lessons from the failure of Livejournal: when not to listen to your users
Your life is the best story! Just start your blog today!
50
51
52
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Why is everyone in such a rush? Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced search for [ title: teach, yourself, hours, since: 2000 and found 512 such books…
53
54
55
Soon it will be time to start over, again
A new generation of young techies comes along, takes a look at the current stack, finds it too daunting (rightly so) and decides to start over from scratch. They find that they can make things happen that the previous generation couldn't cause they were so mired in the complexity of the systems they had built. The new…
56
57
Quit your job
Today I saw a great special on Fine Living TV called Quit Your Job!. Five little companies were featured to showcase the owner’s decision to leave their daily rat dace of a life behind and dive into the uncertainty of following their dreams. Here’s the kicker: These 5 companies are some…
58
Why thinking in the shower may be an ideal model for "creative pause"
I imagine we’d be hard-pressed to find anyone reading these words who hasn’t had an epiphany, big or small, under the cadence of falling water.
59
60