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Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 816 posts.
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Restarting my career after motherhood
My story so far!
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I finally found a use case for my Raspberry Pi Model B+
I take a severely underpowered computer and make it do something useful.
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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.
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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
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Two Years and over 700 Websites Later
An exclusive membership for web pages weighing less than 1 megabyte.
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Digital Gardening in Obsidian
Observing growth in my notes without being overwhelmed.
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Programming as Play
I often want to program something just for fun without any expectations. But why? Well, a recent scientific paper investigated this idea of programming as play.
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A principled way to solve problems
Today I’m writing some short thoughts on how to design solutions or decide on actions when you face a new problem. TL;DR constantly ask yourself what you are trying to do. One of the main lessons I’ve learned in this short time working in research (as an intern), is to be methodological. Especially when you are doing…
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Those writing extensively on note-writing rarely have a serious context of use
Much of the day-to-day thinking involved in creative work is simply lost, like sand castles in the tide. Ephemerality can actually be useful in low-fidelity thought, but it’s simply an accidental property in many cases. We should do our serious thinking in the form of Evergreen notes so that the thinking accumulates.
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The art of sharpening pencils (2007)
See all the popular styles and methods of sharpening pencils and learn a few tricks too.
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A complete guide to creating actually useful courses
Free guide to creating an online course: pick a topic, validate it, teach with practice, and pre-launch before you film. No email.
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To Become Wise, Do Less
Embrace leisure and abhor the need to always be productive to actually become productive
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TV, or not TV: the story of our bike box (2019)
Our bikes kept getting damaged in transit. Our solution – print a giant TV on the side of the box. Here's how that one tiny decision made a huge impact.
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Hi, hello, I’m back at it
*peeks hesitantly around the corner* Hey everyone. Tomorrow, after almost 7 months of a sabbatical break, I’m resuming regular publication of kottke.org. (Actua
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Adventures in Advent of Code
I’ve been participating regularly in Advent of Code for the past couple of years. It’s one of the highlights of my holiday season. The puzzles are fun, the stories are appropriately ridiculous, and it’s a neat way for me to keep the cobwebs brushed off some of the things I learned years ago that I don’t regularly use…
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Pages that didn't make it into “How DNS Works”
Pages that didn't make it into "How DNS Works"
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Embracing Modern C++ Safely, Book Review
C++11 has been around for around 11 years and C++14 for 8. From my experience, I see that even today, many companies struggle to use those standards in production in the most efficient way. As always, with new stuff came benefits, risks, and increased learning effort. Fortunately, with a new book written by top C++…
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On Why I'm Quitting Alcohol
Essay 52
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How to write like Malcolm Gladwell
Prose style and structure in The Tipping Point
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How to stop a robot vacuum from getting stuck on the laundry rack
Is your robotic vacuum cleaner getting stuck on the laundry drying rack? Just raise the rack slightly off the floor and it becomes a natural robot barrier.
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An unexpected ass kicking (2012)
One afternoon in Portland, I walked into World Cup & Tea to do some work. Instead, I had an encounter with the guy who invented the computer: Russell Kirsch
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