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Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,940 posts.

Any year
8681

Mojito island is a mirage

Early retirement is a mirage when you’re physically and mentally capable of doing more. Humans are generally not built to derive sustainable happiness from sipping mojitos on a picturesque island somewhere in the pacific. Once you’ve tasted the sweetness of a dedicated purpose, it’…

8682

How to Do What You Love (2006)

January 2006 To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated. The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work…

8684

California

You get your brand new iPod home, in its shiny black box, which you open, and the first words you see are: “Designed by Apple in California.” It’s printed on the back of every iPo…

8685

z/OMG

Two weeks ago I was on a Project Management course at work, which was highly enjoyable and very involved. Project management for a company this big is evidently a very complex and rigorous process involving all kinds of procedural steps and checks and formal presentations of stuf...

8695

Eric S. Raymond speaks heresy.

Event sourcing is an excellent software design pattern. Instead of persisting current state of an asset and mutating it in place. An asset is represented by the events through its life cycle. When the current state of an asset is needed its re-computed from the events.

8698

How to Create a Self-Referential Tweet

Yesterday Mark Reid posted on Twitter a challenge : create a self-referential tweet (one that links to itself). He later clarified that the tweet should contain in its text its own identifier (the number after " /status/" bit should be its own URL). I decided to take up the challenge ("in order to learn a bit about…

8699

Why I'm Not a Writer (1996)

I'm not a writer. Sometimes I write, but I don't define myself as a career writer. And that isn't because I couldn't tolerate the garret lifestyle of an obscure writer. It is because I couldn't tolerate the garret lifestyle of a successful writer. By successful I don't mean Edith Wharton. I don't think it is…