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Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,939 posts.
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The B Lane Swimmer (2009)
A number of years ago, I joined a Master’s swim team. I was doing triathlons at the time, and the swim was my weakest leg. The team I joined divided the pool into four lanes: A (fastest swimmers), B (next fastest), C (next fastest) and D (slowest.) Workouts were organized accordingly; faster swimmers were assigned…
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So you want to write a technical book
If you’re knowledgeable in a technical field, writing a book to teach others a few things can be a rewarding experience on many different levels. With the many avenues available for self-publishing these days, an important question to ask yourself is “Do I need a publisher?”. The answer depends on your particular…
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A Light Box in Heavy Times
My son is nearing his second birthday, which makes him nearly two years old. When he was only four months old I decided that I would make him something with buttons. I didn’t have much more of an idea than that, but I ordered one hundred illuminated buttons and started mulling what to do with them. Nothing much…
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Common Causes of Bad Decisions
Italian psychologist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini was once asked why people keep making the same mistakes.
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Princess Pricklepants, Startup Founder Extraordinaire
Previously: Princess Pricklepants, Entrepreneur Dear reader, for our preamble we’d like to say a number of fascinating, witty, clever, and delightful things, but we can’t think of any. …
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The best things and stuff of 2011 by Fogus
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2011. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
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Greenland Sharks
Greenland shark swimming under an ice flow in the Canadian arctic WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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Tilton
In 2000, the programmatic browser differences were perplexing, so I made a tool to help manage the problem. I started with something similar to ecomcon (see How JavaScript Works , Chapter 23). I would have special markers in the source that designated sections of code that would only be delivered to particular…
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I’m Leaving IBM
Today is my last day at IBM. If you’ve been following along, IBM bought my startup Resilient Systems in Spring 2016. Since then, I have been with IBM, holding the nicely ambiguous title of “Special Advisor.” As of the end of the month, I will be back on my own. I will continue to write and speak, and do the occasional…
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How to Think Real Good (2013)
Practical epistemology: heuristics for how to think about difficult things, particularly using formal methods.
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Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
Utopian energy is an imagined form of energy that’s abundant, reliable, inexpensive, and also clean, renewable, and life-sustaining. But utopian energy is as much a fantasy as a utopian society. Seeking the fount of perfect energy allows us to pretend there aren’t real-world tradeoffs between, say,
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What’s the Difference Between American English and British English?
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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I’ve made a conscious effort to stop apologizing for bugs in my code
Look out, honey, ’cause I’m using technologyAin’t got time to make no apologyThe Stooges, “Search and Destroy” For the last year or so, I’ve made a conscious eff…
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Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should
I investigated the various standards available for storing and presenting recipes on the web
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I Remain a Skeptic
I still do not use LLMs for anything I actually care about. There are a lot of reasons I could give: environmental, social, political. I could talk about ecosystem lock-in, learned dependence, self-soverignty, philosophical concerns, the intentional dismantling of labour bargaining power, and more. But before all of…
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What Should a 4 Year Old Know? (2010)
It’s back to school time and children all over are starting preschool. Many parents are frantically searching the internet to find out if their little ones are “on track” and kno…
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No one gives a shit what programming language you use
I’ve had it up to here (gestures at nose level) with the bullshit around programming language elitism. Back when I thought it mattered I was just as bad as the bullshit I’m seeing today…
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The Curse of Markdown
And the content website wasteland
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Self-control secrets of the Puritan masters
People today are fighting the temptations of a new economy.
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If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?
Then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?
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A divorce in Italy destroyed my researcher career
Preface:I have worked in the United States and England as a researcher for most of my life, I am Italian and a few years ago I became the father of a beautiful daughter. Unfortunately, for reasons …
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The Best Method to Master a Foreign Language, Guaranteed
Dear Korean, My name is The English Teacher. The English Teacher has a question for The Korean. The English Teacher read the Korean's rece...
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Don't Subscribe So Casually
Or, why your AI subscription is worth analyzing
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The story of Max, a real programmer
This is a story about Imagebin. Imagebin is the longest-lived software project that I still maintain. I'm the only user. I use it to host images, mainly to include in my blog, sometimes for sharing in other places. Imagebin's oldest changelog entry is dated May 2010, but I know it had already existed for about a year…
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An Apple Developer for 10 Years
This is a personal website, at the outskirts of the web, away from social media and publishing platforms.