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Life, Learning & Writing

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

Any year
7211

No Russian

Many people in Silicon Valley inquired over the years why I was not coming back to Russia often (I visited once in two decades) or why I’m not spending much time helping Russian startups. I u…

7212

Wrong signal

In recent months, privacy and civil rights activists have increasingly recommended the use of Signal [1] , an instant messenger app developed by Open Whisper Systems (OWS). After Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election in particular, many tweets recommended using hard disk encryption and the ostensibly…

7216

Software Rot (2017)

Software rots. That is: Adapting mature software to new circumstances tends to take more time and effort than writing new software from scratch. Software people don't like to admit this, but open so…

7217

Practising Programming

When we see a world-class musician flawlessly play challenging music, it can be tempting to imagine that they were always able to do so. A moment’s thought makes it obvious that they must have had to spend huge amounts of time practising basic techniques in order to reach that level. What’s less obvious is that they…

7221

My Visit to Deep Springs College (2009)

You should neither trust outward appearances, nor let them intimidate you. There is always a discord between the appearance that a person or organization projects, and their actual nature. For this reason, always be careful about the people and organizations in whom you place your trust.

7224

Beyond Remote

On Monday, Twitter and Square announced they were going remote-first as a company. Three days later Facebook and Shopify had similar announcements. Since then, Twitter and every one of my group chats have been lit up with discussions on what the implications of these changes will be on the future of work. I've been…

7228

All the Technology but None of the Love

This post has been re-written several times, so please forgive me if it does not come across as coherent as I would like to. The main reason for the re-write was this post by Martin Wedge . Originally I planned to scrap the whole thing but maybe having a different perspective will help, I’ve deleted those parts that…