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Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,940 posts.
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Documenting Dance: Keeping Score (2017)
At several points throughout history, someone has sat down to watch a ballet; a long and complex performance with multiple dancers and changes of music and style, and at the end of it, said: “someh…
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Toward an exploratory medium for mathematics
The world's oldest complete piece of surviving music is the 3,400-year-old Hurrian cult hymn . The hymn was found inscribed on clay tablets excavated from the ancient city of Ugarit, in modern-day Syria. Sometime after the hymn was composed, the idea of using notation to record music was lost. Writing two millennia…
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Ditch the sim rig and use your car instead (2019)
Use DIY CAN bus tools to convert your car into the best sim rig ever
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Yes, learn basic programming
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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My Org Roam Notes Workflow (2021)
A description of my org-roam notes workflow, from writing the notes to publishing them on my website.
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Kill the Alarm Clock (2017)
Few upwardly mobile people in the modern rat-race society can live without an alarm clock. With a shot of strong coffee and round-the-clock stress, most people learn to live and survive with an alarm clock. Half of the population wakes up with an alarm, 9% are woken by a partner, 4% by pets, 3% by children, etc. That…
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What to do when you’ve ruined your life
Every now and then, life becomes unacceptable. What do you do then?
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Why are mathematicians so bad at arithmetic? (2017)
18 x 93 is… hey, look over there!
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A blog does not need “analytics”
Analytics are a military and financial tool. Your blog is not and you shouldn’t surveil you readers.
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Things the most successful people I know struggle with to be happy
“You wouldn’t want to be me.” is the line Elon Musk tells Joe Rogan about his life. Many of us see the successes and the outward experiences people produce and think up. Yet, few of us get to see what it’s like on the inside of that person’s body or day to day life. It […]
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The hero's journey of getting laid off
Culture, technology, & travel once or twice a week. Click to read Back to Humanity, a Substack publication.
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Two Years of Vanlife: A Retrospective
This is our most EPIC post to date: two years of vanlife condensed into one article! Tales from the road, van talk, lessons learned, etc. MUST READ!
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A dictionary of single-letter variable names
Haskell’s expressive type system means that type signatures can carry a lot of information. Haskell’s polymorphism means that you sometimes write functions that work across an enormous range of types, and are left wondering “what do I actually call my variables?”. It is often the case that there’s nothing to say…
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Should you work fixed hours, even if you have a flexible schedule?
The beauty of having a flexible schedule, when you are a freelancer, remote worker, or consultant, is being able to work whenever you like. When traveling, you can spend the whole day touring and working at night. Or maybe working in the morning and night, and enjoying the evenings. Whatever you want, it’s your call…
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Toward a Better Music Theory (2013)
Update: a version of this post appeared on Slate.com. I seem to have touched a nerve with my rant about the conventional teaching of music theory and how poorly it serves practicing musicians. I th…
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Sysop Chat
Back in mid-90s before anyone I knew had an Internet connection, a few of us had modems and would use them to call bulletin board systems via the phone line. On these systems what to me seemed the main thing was discussions and chat. For the first time I could talk to other like-minded people, and just being able to…
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A new Little Prince museum has opened its doors in Switzerland
The Besenval Palace in Solothurn opened the museum « Der Kleine Prinz und seine Welt » dedicated to the Little Prince through the collection of Jean-Marc Probst.
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Dropbox keeps threatening to delete my files
For the past two years, I’ve been on the receiving end of a passive aggressive win-back campaign from Dropbox. The feud originally started when I migrated away from Dropbox and hence canceled my subscription while leaving them saddled with over a terabyte of my data to carry forever, like a camel in the digital…
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Eastern European Guide to Writing Reference Letters
Excruciating. One phrase I often use to describe what it's like to read reference letters for Eastern European applicants to PhD and Master's programs in Cambridge. Even objectively outstanding students often receive dull, short, factual, almost negative-sounding reference letters. This is a result of (A)...