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Never waste a midlife crisis
John Higgs on the decision to become a full-time writer.
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 669 posts.
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Most of my skills are now worth nothing, but 10% are worth 1000x
...but the other 10% are worth 1000x
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I almost bought a scanner
I almost bought a scanner. Mainly for my Alpine Panoramics project . The key here is that I am still shooting most of these photos on a Hasselblad Xpan - a long since discontinued film camera that shoots two 35mm frames side by side to achieve a panoramic frame covering approximately 65x24mm.
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Shoshikantetsu
The other day I was visiting my family in Hawaii when I complained to my mother about not wanting to do a planned run that afternoon. I told her that I was tired and was dreading physical exercise. Despite that, I explained to her that I was going to do it, even if it meant I ran a lot slower than my regular pace.
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LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night
Yes, it’s a spicy title. Yes, I plan to back it with what I consider very reasonable evidence of the claims, in the form of a lot of research papers. I would simply ask that you read to the end before deciding I’ve lost it.
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I Love Ruby
I've done a lot in my career. From working on business support software to big backend systems and even robotics. If there's been a consistent through-line to my career, it's the Ruby programming language.
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43 Hours on the Amtrak Southwest Chief
Personal blog and website of Lennart Koopmann.
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Teaching ChatGPT to speak my son’s invented language
Becoming fluent in my son’s invented language was too difficult for me, so I decided to see how would AI do.
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Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
New global study from Sapien Labs finds consistent links, stronger for girls
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One week of empathy training (2019)
I've spent a week cosplaying as a disabled user. And I hate it. A couple of months ago, I attended a private talk given by a disabled colleague of mine. "Everyone should believe disabled people's stories about accessibility problems," she said. "But, given that people don't, here's what I want you to do. Spend one…
102
We overestimate our short-term ability, but underestimate our long-term ability
My way of thinking about long-term habit building
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Things they didn’t teach you about software engineering
As a seasoned software engineer, I've discovered that there's so much more to the field than what's taught in school. From the importance of understanding business needs and the value of soft skills, to the necessity of continuous learning and the reality of dealing with legacy code, my journey has been filled with…
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Cookie Clicker saved my PhD
Or, how I cookie-clicked my way to a doctorate in interaction design. It’s been 5 years since I finished my Ph.D. on user interfaces for machine learning. To celebrate/commiserate, I’m sharing an u…
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What is the minimal possible UK address?
Postcodes in the UK are pretty specific — a postcode such as “SE1 6AD” will often identify one or a few specific buildings, unlike countries where a postcode represents an entire neighbourhood. This leads to an interesting question: how short can you get an address and still have Royal Mail deliver post there? To…
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Quitting the rat race
I'm leaving a comfortable job in a big city because there's more to life than whatever this is.
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Some insects I found inside dried Turkish figs from Trader Joe’s
During an online wasp identification course I participated in several weeks ago, there was a fun discussion about whether commercially-produced figs contained fig wasps (Agaonidae, in the Chalcidoidea). Opinions varied, plus some asserted, as do many internet pages, that even if wasps were once insi
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Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket
I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that you, like me, have a large pile (or digital equivalent) of books or articles you've been meaning to get around to reading, plus maybe a long queue of podcast episodes to which you'd love to listen, if only you had the time. It's the archetypal "first-world problem", I…
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I walked across Luxembourg
A hike from the west to the east of the Grand Duchy
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How to lose $950 quickly on Airbnb
How I lost $950 in about an hour on AirBnB by stupidly thinking it worked like a hotel
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Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
One thing I’ve learned over time is to read fewer books but to take the time to write summaries for the good ones. The ROI of spending 2h writing a synopsis is much higher than spending those 2h powering through the next book on your list. Reading is not about page count or speed. What matters is ho
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In search of the least viewed article on Wikipedia (2022)
Wikipedia sure is popular. The most popular articles in a given week routinely get millions of views. But with 6 million plus articles, Wikipedia has plenty ...
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The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review
The Staff Engineer’s Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change is written by Tanya Reilly and published on October 25, 2022, by O’Reilly Media. Favorite Quotes Early in your career, if you do a great job on something that turns out to be unnecessary, you’ve still done a great job. At the…
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Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
Six propositions for evaluating the evidence.
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Two years of teaching high school CS
(This post is also now also listed on the Pickcode Blog) Leaving Teaching I’m posting this on my last day teaching high school computer science. In the pas...