Topics /

Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 669 posts.

2023
606

Earning the privilege to work on unoriginal problems

The startup world is almost by definition a place where you “live in the future”. Working in an early-stage startup, your whole belief system is based on being able to successfully create something new. Something that will become a great and cherished product, used all around the world. It needs to be this way, or…

607

I prefer semi-automation

I really try to automate part of my work. But I do not always strive to automate the task at hand entirely. I have come to realize, at least for my usual duties, that automation is a balance between the productivity and consistency gains you would get from not doing it by hand versus the time it would take to cover…

608

Recreating Medieval English Ales (1998)

In medieval England, ale was an alcoholic drink made from grain, water, and fermented with yeast. The difference between medieval ale and beer was that beer also used hops as an ingredient. Virtually everyone drank ale. It provided significant nutrition as well as hydration (and inebriation). The aristocracy could…

614

Profound Beliefs

This post previously appeared in EIX. In the early stages of a startup your hypotheses about all the parts of your business model are your profound beliefs. Think of profound beliefs as “strong opi…

617

Two types of C programmers

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…