Topics /

Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,939 posts.

Any year
6633

"TLDR" is unnecessary

If you summarize your idea in your first sentence, writing "TLDR" is superfluous. The English Language already has tools to summarize and communicate your thoughts. Leverage existing conventions, which are accepted by a larger population, and you will engage more users and succeed in communicating your idea. "TLDR"…

6636

Why 13th Chords

As the background to my music theory is more classical in nature, it used to puzzle me when I saw jazz chords like C9, B♭11 or F13. I mean, I knew what a 9th, 11th and 13th note were but I wondered why you'd call a note a 9th rather than a 2nd, or a 13th rather than a 6th and so on.

6639

Hydrofoiling

I was standing on a floating dock on a Pacific-ocean inlet, a place where it’s obvious why motorboats are such an environmental disaster. Fortunately lots of other people have noticed too and it looks increasingly that more people will be able to enjoy Messing About In Boats without feeling like they’re making Greta…

6641

Why I'm Learning Sumerian

After burning out on a massive project, I started learning Sumerian, a language no one’s spoken in 4,000 years. What began as a useless obsession turned into a lesson on meaning, burnout, and the quiet joy of doing hard things that don’t need to matter.

6649

The Worst (2012)

I don’t really know who Dustin Curtis is, but he blogs a lot, and those blog entries often end up onHacker News. Not too long ago, he wrote a blog post titled “The Best,” in which he explains that he has nice stuff. That in fact, everything he owns is actually the very best of its kind.Dustin’s...

6652

Why Entrepreneurs Can't Sleep

For those of you that know me well, you know that I have terrible, horrible insomnia. In high school, I would go to sleep around 3am and then struggle to get up at 6:30 am. I would drink a dozen Mountain Dews everyday just to stay awake. In college, my schedule shifted further so that I was falling asleep around 6am…

6654

Dear Google, am I pregnant?

Here in the UK, we are a signatory to the European Convention of Human Rights, which among other things includes an explicit right to privacy (considerably stronger than the implicit privacy rights acknowledged in the US, which are not enumerated directly by the US constitution).

6656

Changing Directions

<p>I have two important announcements:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I&rsquo;m leaving the tech industry. Hopefully &ldquo;for good&rdquo;; if not, at least &ldquo;for now&rdquo;.</p> </li> <li> <p>As such, the content on this blog is going to shift, perhaps dramatically. I&rsquo;m going to be writing about a broader range of…

6658

The Unhealthy Desire for Prestige

There is an unhealthy desire for prestige and money that is ruining people's lives. At the end of all the striving, you might end up feeling empty inside. The desire for prestige and money is why we: 1) spend an outrageous sum of money on education despite it being free, 2) kill ourselves at jobs we