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Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot
Tutorial for tying the Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot, in which the laces are formed into two loops, both of which are passed through the “hole” in the middle.
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,926 posts.
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I skipped to the ending
When I was 8 years old I started making websites with my friend. His grandmother had purchased him a domain name and web hosting. It was 2003 and the world was whispering of Web 2.0. Books I checked out of the library talked about DHTML (dynamic HTML, basically what any web app is today). There was no mobile app…
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How to learn chess as an adult (2021)
Becoming the worst best chess player in the world
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It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
Many iPhone owners have iMessages from years ago that they can’t access. For example, my wife and I simply want to read the first few messages that we exchanged in 2017, but we can’t. A friend of mine recently had to prove she had a relationship with someone for US immigration services, and she was able to quickly…
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Why I Keep a Research Blog
Before I started taking writing seriously, I had a loose grasp of many mathematical and technical concepts; and I was not sure how to tackle open-ended problems. Maintaining this research blog has clarified my thoughts and improved how I approach research problems. The goal of this post is to explain why I have found…
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Fuck it, make it anyway
Carrying on in the face of creative devaluation.
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The hidden cost of air quality monitoring
The hidden costs of air quality monitoring, including subscriptions, locked data, proprietary modules, and the long-term price of closed ecosystems.
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Maybe you should do less 'work'
Working in tech, I've observed developers who work as hard as possible when they don't need to. I’m here today to tell you that it's a bad idea and you shouldn't do it.
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Less stress, more productivity: working fewer hours is good for you and your boss
There’s always too much work to be done on software projects, too many features to implement, too many bugs to fix. Some days you’re just not going through the backlog fast enough, you’re not producing enough code, and it’s taking too long to fix a seemingly-impossible bug. And to make things worse you’re wasting time…
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I’m a very slow thinker (2016)
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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The Last Post
Here it is. I'm dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote—the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive.
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I'm addicted to being useful
When I get together with my friends in the industry, I feel a little guilty about how much I love my job. This is a tough time to be a software engineer. The…
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How to write blog posts that developers read
Software bloggers can make the same mistakes for years that prevent readers from discovering their writing. I know because I'm one of them. Over time, I've learned techniques that help some blog posts succeed and the pitfalls that cause others to languish in obscurity.
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Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them
This article has been translated into Spanish: Por qué debes aprender más lenguajes de programación (incluso si no los vas a utilizar)
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I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric
This is a story that started back in 2022, but I think its a perfect time to reflect on the impact that it has had on my friend group still to this day. Update (2/7/2025): I'm genuinely blown away by the response to this post. This hit the
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Daydreaming about the future instead of doing work today
I have a friend who’s creating an awesome side project: LED signs that you can control to let your coworkers know you’re busy.…
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Rental camera gear destroyed by the 2017 eclipse
We recently had quite a spectacle in the United States, with a Solar Eclipse reaching totality throughout a large portion of the United States. Being that this was the first solar eclipse passing…
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My Colleague Julius
My colleague Julius par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
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Programming is hard
Most beginners in programming eventually end up with the same ingratiating message: „Programming is easy, everyone can do it”, with some threatening message that people doing the gatekeeping should stop doing that. I’m here to tell you that that is not true. Programming is hard, programming is not for everyone, and…
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Aging programmer
Back in college, they told me that I would start my career writing code, but eventually, I would move to a position where I would ask others to code my designs. To celebrate that this turned out to be completely false, here are some assorted reflections as a 40-year-old programmer that looks back: • Compared to my…