1051
How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant
Within two emails, a merchant went from blatant dismissal to full payment, and I owe it to The Organized Professional Method.
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,927 posts.
1052
Encouraging a culture of written communication
More and more people are being exposed to working remotely. One of the key factors for success in a remote workplace is a culture of written communication.…
1053
How I Almost Destroyed a £50M War Plane and the Normalisation of Deviance (2016)
‘RECOVER!’ came the shout from the back seat of my Tornado GR4 combat jet but it wasn’t necessary - I had already started…
1054
My rude-ass car
I need to vent about the impolite piece of yet-to-become e-waste on wheels that is my rude-ass car . You've heard versions of this story before, nothing is particularly novel in the shock department, enshittification is everywhere, etcetera... but I need the catharsis.
1055
Why I switched from OS X to Linux
I'm not writing macOS because I switched before the new name came along. But let me start at the beginning.
1056
Three years in North Korea as a foreigner (2021)
Surviving 3 years in North Korea as a foreign diplomat was not easy. Living and working in the Hermit Kingdom was certainly the unique experience of a lifetime.
1057
The past is not true
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.
1058
I saw a cool truck today
If you ever see it too, thank London
1059
1060
The Tools I Use to Write Books
This article has been translated into Russian: Полезные инструменты для написания книг Thank you Vlad!
1061
My dead dad’s journal
For some reason, when my brother told me our dad was dead, I immediately went and listened to my voicemails. He left me silly voicemails often and I wanted to hear his voice.
1062
Is Every Speed Limit Too Low?
Americans nearly universally speed, and excess speed is a factor in many accidents. But what if higher speed limits made roads safer?
1063
Ditching Obsidian and building my own
Tired of migrating notes apps like Obsidian or Evernote? Learn how to build your own private, long-term PKM using self-hosted Directus for control & longevity.
1064
You are not 'behind'
Have you ever felt like you were behind? I used to feel that way. I would read articles about a 26-year-old entrepreneur with a billion-dollar company or a 16-year-old kid who invented a new kind o…
1065
Learning to program is getting harder
I have written several books that use Python to explain topics like Bayesian Statistics and Digital Signal Processing. Along with the books...
1066
Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
Why tinkering matters as a lifelong learning tool.
1067
Want anonymity? Make a persona not a mystery
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.
1068
Summer Reading List
The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan [https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Knew-Times-Greenspan/dp/0143111094] [https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Knew-Times-Greenspan/dp/0143111094] “I thought Greenspan was bad but this book paints a positive image. Seb Mallaby is an awesome author so makes for an easy read.”…
1069
Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious
I've recently seen lots of people tweeting this supposed newspaper clipping. An olde-timey warning about wearing flu masks. But is it too good to be true? The first thing to do with any image of a text quote is to search for the text. Look, I'm not saying tumblr isn't great, but… I wouldn't exactly trust it as a…
1070
Move Fast and Abandon Things
Maybe it’s the change of weather. Fall often finds me looking backward, to the past — and anyway it is as good excuse as any as to why I have found myself peering into old hard drives trying to recover old bits and bytes from games that I wrote some thirty-five years ago or so.
1071
I have a theory that software drives people insane
I have a little pet theory that software drives people insane. Not in the "wash your hands every thirty minutes like Howard Hughes" kind of way, but more ...
1072
1073
In Memory of Stiver
On October 20, the original author of the Fernflower Java decompiler, Stiver, passed away after a long fight against glioblastoma. Stiver was a German programmer of Russian origin, primarily devel
1074
I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
I’ve started writing more Python code lately (because of… AI, you know). In this post, I share the tools, libraries, configs, and other integrations I use for building production-grade Python applications following a frontend-backend architecture.
1075
The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
This is not just “Kids these days”
1076
The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy
Why I've gotten more and more pessimistic about my relationship with Twitter.
1077
What's a virus, anyway? The bare-bones basics
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, viruses are getting a lot of attention; here's an inside look into the most abundant life form on Earth.
1078
I Got a Knuth Check for 0x$3.00
Donald Knuth is a computer scientist who is so committed to the correctness of his books that he offers one US hexadecimal dollar ($2.56, 0x$1.00) for any “bug” found in his books, where a bug is anything that is “technically, historically, typographically, or politically incorrect”. I wanted to get a Knuth check for…
1079
Has_not_been_viewed_much
Museum APIs and the art that hasn't been viewed much.
1080
A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
Your 60 hour work week is not a badge of honour. It is a problem. It means the business design has failed, or there's a breakdown in communication, or worse.