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The Sound of Silence
I recently heard one of the more interesting insights about Silicon Valley I'd heard in a while. It explained something I’d wondered about for years. But I can't tell you what it was. There's too...
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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 359 posts.
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Unlearning descriptive statistics
If you've ever used an arithmetic mean, a Pearson correlation or a standard deviation to describe a dataset, I'm writing this for you. Better numbers exist to summarize location, association and spread: numbers that are easier to interpret and that don't act up with wonky data and outliers.
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The Reality of Developer Burnout
Burnout is, unfortunately, a very real phenomenon in software development — especially when creating and maintaining open source projects with large numbers...
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Elixir in Depth – Reading and personal notes
Elixir is a hot and trendy topic nowadays. Of the newer languages that show up periodically on Hacker News, I found t...
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Going for the 5 hour workday
Update: it's been a month since my proposal was approved - details at the end. Before my month long vacation I was in a crisis. Now I'm back at work and regardless of the great team and awesome project - I'm feeling the crisis creeping back. It's not the job,
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I spent three months working full time to get a job
A retrospective on the technical interview process based on three months of searching for a job.
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My Go Resolutions for 2017
’Tis the season for resolutions, and I thought it would make sense to write a little about what I hope to work on this year as far as Go is concerned.
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How to Live Without Google
Minimize Google's invasive tracking with these alternatives for search, email, chat, and more.
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De-Location Package: Keep Your Career and Live Beyond the Bay Area
Learn about the most recent initiatives at Zapier.
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How I learned to program
Tavish Armstrong has a great document where he describes how and when he learned the programming skills he has . I like this idea because I've found that the paths that people take to get into programming are much more varied than stereotypes give credit for, and I think it's useful to see that there are many possible…
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Sorting 2 Tons of Lego, Many Questions, Results
The machine is now capable of running un-attended for hours on end, which is a huge milestone. No more jamming or other nastiness that causes me to interrupt a run. Many little things contributed to this, I’ve looked at all the mechanics and figured out all the little things that went wrong one by one and have come up…
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How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists
From vaccinations to climate change, getting science wrong has very real consequences. But journal articles, a primary way science is communicated in academia, are a different format to newspaper articles or blogs and require a level of skill and undoubtedly a greater amount of patience. Here Jennifer Raff has…
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My Hackintosh Hardware Spec
Some of you have asked about my exact Hackintosh spec, so here it is. I built my Hackintosh in March/April 2014, after finally deciding that the Mac Pro was too expensive and didn’t really fit my needs. The spec I was going to go for was an 8-core model, with 32 gigs of RAM, a 1 TB flash
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Anthony Bourdain on not having debt
Before he was the guy from Parts Unknown, he was 44, never had a savings account, hadn't filed taxes in 10 years, and was AWOL on his AmEx bill. That turned out to be a great financial education.
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The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure
In this article, I break down Japanese sentence structure and show you exactly how Japanese sentences work. A solid understanding of this will save you a huge amount of time trying to make sense of Japanese grammar.
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How Wi-Fi Works
See if you qualify for Fios, 5G Home Internet, or LTE Home Internet with Verizon. View plans, promos, and deals. Plans start at $35/mo.
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The two questions I ask every interviewer
Applying the engineering process to software interviews
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Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding
The median U.S. worker is 42. However, StackOverflow’s survey on age shows that there are just about 13% of developers after 40. Where are the others? Were they fired or moved up to a managerial role? Is software development really a dead end job after 40? Let’s listen to the stories of top software developers after…
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Good books for deep hacks
For the past few months I’ve been compiling a list of books for a deep dive into interesting technical topics. My theory is that working on projects based on these topics will be like strong individual threads I can weave into epic hacks. This list is basically a curriculum for decades of learning about the wonders of…
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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Job Hunt
This is a story about finding a job as a senior software engineer in Toronto - with a twist: just having moved there from Germany.
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People Don’t Buy Products, They Buy Better Versions of Themselves (2016)
Understanding the features vs benefits phenomenon is one of the hardest things to do in product marketing. Here're some examples for features vs benefits products
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“It is never a compiler error”
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter
No, I don’t want to subscribe to your newsletter. No, I don’t want to complete a short survey. And no, I don’t want to become a member. … Is that text in the background? There is content on this page, right? Does the escape key work? Why doesn’t the escape key work? Where’s the close icon? If this is it, why isn’t my…
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Too much fructose can damage your liver, just like too much alcohol
There’s growing scientific consensus that one of the most common types of sugar, fructose, is toxic to the liver, just like alcohol.
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