6241
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,939 posts.
6242
6243
Don't Be Frupid
Frupidity is stupid frugality that wrecks engineering teams. Misguided cost-cutting kills productivity, morale, and innovation. You can fight it.
6244
How to Afford Anything
Home Donate New Search Gallery Reviews How-To Books Links Workshops About Contact
6245
Design
I chose images from 1973 deliberately. It's easier to tell good design from bad when you're not looking at current fashions. (Try looking at the haircuts in an old high school yearbook.) Good design is timeless, and if you want something timeless you can't pander to the limitations of some hypothetical "average" user…
6246
6247
What is the point of an online conference?
My experience of online conferences has mostly been underwhelming. They typically borrow the form and structure of an in-person conference without considering whether those still make sense online, and whether the goals of an online conference should even be the same as an in-person conference.
6248
6249
The myth of the myth of learning styles
“Four different learning styles” has been debunked, but learners still have to learn how they learn, and choose the paths and materials that are right for them.
6250
Sane Thinking About Mental Health Problems
Epistemic status: exhortatory and personal, but pretty confidently my true belief CW: suicide mention When I was a teenager, I was depressed. And the way I thought mental illness worked, the way I…
6251
Life as a Second Class Citizen of the Web
I just bought 3 domain names from GoDaddy. No, that is not news, the news is that I had to use a US based VPN before the purchase went through. (the VPN made the godaddy server think I was browsing from the US). The first 50 times I tried making
6252
The port I couldn't ship
Porting a venerable library on vibes. What started as a quick WebPerl success spiraled into weeks of failed attempts, mangled ASCII diagrams, and a hard lesson about respecting the craft embedded in battle-tested code.
6253
Nailing jelly to a wall: is it possible? (2007)
We've all heard the old saying "it's like nailing jelly to a wall" to describe a task that is very difficult or impossible. But is our view of the difficulty of this task justified? Has anybody actually tried nailing jelly to a wall? In this experiment I attempt to establish, one way or the other, the validity of the…
6254
I Got Fired Last Week. That’s a Good Thing. Here’s Why
“We’d like to help you transition out of the company.” As the conversation progressed and reality sunk in, my ears slammed shut and blood streamed to my head. And since I neglected to bring a jacket for what I thought was … Continue reading →
6255
Can I take ducks home from the park?
16 queries and 6 language models
6256
6257
So I lost my OpenBSD FDE password (2016)
The other day I set up a new OpenBSD instance with a nice RAID array, encrypted with Full Disk Encryption. And promptly proceeded to forget part of the passphrase.
6258
Writing a book for O'Reilly
Part One of a series on how I came to be writing for O’reilly, and what the process is like
6259
Boring work needs tension
We can make our work exciting by chasing the every day tension.
6260
6261
How to Be Jason Bourne: Multiple Passports, Swiss Banking, and Crossing Borders
Is it possible to become invisible without breaking the law? (Photo: gravitywave) LOS ANGELES, MID-JUNE 2008 Sitting on a plush couch in the neon-infused nightclub, I asked again: “What’s it about?” Neil Strauss glanced around and looked nervous, which I found strange. After all, we’d known each other for close to two…
6262
The speed reading fallacy: the case for slow reading
Speed reading promises to help anyone read at speeds of above 1000 words per minute. Sounds fantastic. The problem? It’s completely bogus.
6263
Things You Can Do That Will Make You Happier
Happiness is so interesting, because we all have different ideas about what it is and how to get it. It's also no surprise that it's the Nr....
6264
6265
Moving from Hey to Fastmail
A summary on my personal experience and how you can do it too!
6266
Two Years and over 700 Websites Later
An exclusive membership for web pages weighing less than 1 megabyte.
6267
6268
The disappearing inventor
Mark Bolas , a professor at USC, an astonishingly prolific innovator, has invented or co-invented many things. One of those things was FOV2GO, an ingenious way to make a very inexpensive, very wide angle virtual reality display.
6269
Learn to code like it's 1996
I’ve been meaning to write up my take on the learn to code movement for quite some time now, but for one reason or another haven’t managed to get around to it. Now that the president is endorsing Computer Science and telling Americans to learn to code, this post has jumped to the top of my priority list.
6270
Digital Gardening in Obsidian
Observing growth in my notes without being overwhelmed.