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Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 466 posts.
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Go Pro on a soaring eagle [video]
What does it feel like to soar majestically like an bird? Maybe something like this video, shot with a camera strapped to the back of an eagle flying near Chamo
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Four Hours of Concentration
As I've blogged about before, and mentioned again in my previous post, the great mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré put in two hours of work in the morning and two in the evening. Apparently this is a common pattern. Cal Newport mentions this in his interview with Todd Henry. Now we also know that if
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Thoreau 2.0
This is a written version of a talk I gave on September 21, 2013 , at the XOXO conference in Portland.
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How to Get Good at Chess, Fast
Edit: This article on chess improvement was unexpectedly popular, reaching #2 on Hacker News and being linked to on LifeHacker. Thanks for your patience as I work through all the comments and emails I receive. There are many misconceptions about rapid chess improvement. In this post I’m going to lay out a simple but…
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Existential Depression in Gifted Children
This article by James Webb discusses existential depression among gifted young people. He examines what it is, how it may manifest in a gifted child, and
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Good sleep, good learning, good life
Discover effective online language learning with SuperMemo. Learn languages with proven courses, intelligent repetitions, and AI tools. Start today!
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Stop externalising your life
Software engineer and consultant with >15 years experience. Specializing in product engineering, design systems, and full-stack web development with React and TypeScript.
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What happens when you're #1 on Hacker News for a day
Last Sunday, my post “What I learnt from bootstrapping my startup in Thailand for 6 months” hit #1 on Hacker News and then stayed there for most of the day. He…
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Check you're wearing trousers first
It’s easy, fun, and a catastrophic mistake to over-intellectualise. Unfortunately it also pays pretty well.
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Mark Zuckerberg's Hoodie
It is June 2, 2010 and Mark Zuckerberg is sweating. He's wearing his hoodie—he's always wearing his hoodie—and he's on stage and either the lights or the questions are too hot. His hosts are asking him about the privacy overreaches of Facebook. He's uncomfortable. He's mopping his brow. He apologize
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Could the eagles have flown Frodo into Mordor? (2000)
I probably wrote this page around 2000. At least, it must have been some point before Usenet was a complete ruin.
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A world without power
The 14th of August, 2003 was an interesting day in many ways. I’d just taken the family down to Toronto to spend a day there and pick up our newly minted passports at the Dutch embassy. We had some fun in the city seeing the sights, visited Niagara Falls and were on the way back on a sunny August thursday afternoon…
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40 Days Without Booze
Recently, as a “kick-in-the-butt” motivator, I promised myself that I would abstain from alcoholic beverages until I finished the first draft of a novel I’ve been working on. I had set a target date for completing the project (June 30th), with the idea that if I didn’t finish by that date, I’d stop drinking booze […]
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Here’s what I learned hanging out with Jason Fried
Discuss on Hacker News. I went to meet Jason Fried so I could learn how to stop selling software by accident. Since I started programming 10 years ago, I’v
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Off
Part of it was the lack of surprises, which isn’t Apple’s fault. All of the product upgrades, while nice, were incremental and predictable. None of the pricing was a surprise. In fact, the only unexpected product announcement is the zombie iPad 2 sticking around for another year, shamelessly at the same price as last…
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So you think you can tell Arial from Helvetica?
I've taken 20 logos that were originally designed in Helvetica, and I've redone them in Arial. Some people would call that blasphemy. I call it a challenge: can you tell which is the original and which is the remake?
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Does Steve Jobs know how to code?
Our curriculum is designed with one goal in mind: to help you launch your career in technology. As a global leader in curriculum development, our programs meet — or exceed — the hiring requirements of the technology jobs you want, empowering you with Day-1 Skills. WOZ technology training features in-browser coding…
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Aaron Swartz: The Book That Changed My Life
Two years ago this summer I read a book that changed the entire way I see the world. I had been researching various topics — law, politics, the media — and become more and more convinced that something was seriously wrong. Politicians, I was shocked to discover, weren’t actually doing what the people wanted. And the…