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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 816 posts.
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Alain de Botton on existential maturity and what emotional intelligence means
“The emotionally intelligent person knows that they will only ever be mentally healthy in a few areas and at certain moments, but is committed to fathoming their inadequacies and warning othe…
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Book review: The Little Typer (2021)
A book review of my journey through dependent typing.
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U.S. Surnames with No Vowels
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Have I reached the Douglas Adams Inflection point?
The all-knowing sage Douglas Adams had this to say about technology: Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can…
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The Danger of Journaling Is Introspection
I was having an off-day a few months ago. To try and lift my spirits, I decided to take advantage of the fact that I have the ability to time travel. Not literally, of course, but figuratively in the one direction of the past (which is almost as good
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Visually symmetric words
The word "kayak" is a palindrome, but it isn't visually symmetric. The word "bud" is visually symmetric, but not a palindrome.
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Every complex idea has a million stupid cousins
Chances are, you've met far more stupid cousins than you realize
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Why does a librarian own MetaFilter?
Jessamyn West is not just one of the web's favorite librarians, but the new owner of Metafilter, an incredibly long-running social network that dates back to a very different Internet. In the first part of our interview with Jessamyn, she tells us just how Metafilter has kept going and stayed healthy since 1999.
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I wrote a short story about von Neumann probes
"They would have eaten our whole house and probably the whole cul-de-sac if we didn't find those jelly beans."
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Notes on Ukraine: I spent most of April and some of May traveling around Ukraine
I spent most of April and some of May traveling around Ukraine, visiting the cities of Uzhgorod, Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Odessa. As with my other travels, I’ll write down thoughts and obse…
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The Documentation Triangle, or, why code isn't self documenting
These statements can be hard to argue against, especially if they come from someone who is more experienced than you. A lot of the trouble is that they are not wrong – well, they’re not completely wrong.
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The scourge of Rec dot gov (2021)
Recreation DOT gov gets managed by the multi-billion dollar DC beltway firm of Booz-Allen-Hamilton. And here’s why I think it’s awful.
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Let’s Not Have a Beer
For the first time, I won a major raffle at a recent conference. However, I had to give the prize back since it was a beer dispenser and I don’t drink. If your reaction after reading the last line was “Why don’t you drink?” or “Most of us do and it’s your choice that you missed out.”, then this blog is for you. I’m…
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Voting from Antarctica
How to vote back home while you're in Antarctica!
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No is a complete sentence
Has someone asked you to do something recently that you know you don’t have time to do but felt like you needed to do anyway? Or has someone tried to get you to help with something and impres…
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Interview with Keith Blount, Creator of Scrivener
An interview with Keith Blount, the founder, director and lead developer of Literature & Latte.
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How to avoid being a secretary for engineers (2018)
If we just see our task as documenting solutions that engineers have solved, it removes the creativity and critical thinking dimension from tech comm. The creative dimension in tech comm comes into play as we identify and solve tech comm challenges, such as devising ways to simplify complexity or otherwise improve the…
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Laundry at the end of the world
It's pretty much what you'd expect.
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Ethnographic research on Dynamicland
The “Dynamic Medium Group” led by Bret Victor which is developing “Dynamicland” is much admired and closely watched in the interaction design community. Yet the information about their work is closely-guarded and usually only available in a highly moderated form. The work of ethnographer Götz Bachmann, who spent much…
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Where to wait for an elevator (2010)
Where do you stand in order to minimize the expected distance to walk to catch the first elevator that arrives? Maybe not where you think.
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Walking the World: Seoul
Consumption, brutality, and the cute
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Luck Surface Area: How to Get Lucky In Life
You can't force luck. But you can increase your chances (by a lot) to get lucky. Here's how to do it with luck surface area.
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Arguing Without Warning
We should encourage more public disagreement.
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Bill Watterson, Picasso, and self promotion
One of the most interesting pieces I’ve come across lately was Hugh Eakin’s piece on the backstory of one of Picasso’s most prominent works, Guernica. During the creative process for Guernica, Picasso created 45 different sketches before settling on the final direction of the painting: Guernica debuted in 1937 at the…
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How to control the metacognition process of programming?
by Laurence Chen There is a famous quote: Programming is thinking, not typing. After doing this job long enough, sometimes, I feel I am doing too much typing. No matter whether...