Topics /

Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 465 posts.

2019
94

Practical Facts about the Human Brain

I don’t think it’d have been possible for me to connect with the topic of emotional resilience without a really solid amount of scientific evidence and brain facts supporting it. As a self-identified left-brained male, I need a lot of safety signals from the world of science to really allow myself to go deeper into […]

97

How to get rich without getting lucky (2018)

A collection of all my interviews about my ‘How to Get Rich’ tweetstorm. Seek Wealth, Not Money or Status Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep You probably know Naval from his Twitter account. We’re going to talk about his tweetstorm, “How To Get Rich (without getting lucky).” More

105

German for Programmers

After 2 years of learning German I’ve noticed that, for the most part, you can go a long way by mapping foreign concepts to ones that you already know. In particular, I’ve had success mapping aspects of German grammar to programming concepts I use every day. After all, programmers deal with weird grammars all the…

106

The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

I promise you this story is true. Many years ago, when I was very young and you were even younger... Work was not going well. Our recently launched product was a flop. Rumours of job cuts were swirling. Things were tense. I was sat in work, headphones on, trying to drown out the sound of the open-plan office. Grinding…

118

The Power of Shower Thoughts

One of the best ways to learn and come up with new ideas is to focus intensely on a problem, then let your mind wander. I’ve enjoyed doing this when problem solving and learning, and recently I’ve been thinking about how weird it is to build trust in your unconscious to do the work for you, especially when it comes to…

120

Why am I interested in Elixir?

I’ve had Elixir on the brain recently. And by recently I probably mean 2 years. In my defense I think it is fair to say it is blooming right now. I haven’t had much need of it, or opportunity for it, in my day-to-day of maintaining a Python legacy system, renewing another legacy or optimizing Elasticsearch. So I’ve…