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Computer science courses that don't exist, but should
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,927 posts.
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You don’t need to work on hard problems (2020)
A lot of smart college students end up with the idea that “solving hard technical problems” is the best thing they can do with their life—probably because that’s the only thing they’ve ever been rewarded for so far.
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25 years of coding, and I'm just beginning
I've come to a conclusion that I have nothing to show for my 25 years of coding. I am ready to begin and I have a plan.
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How I learned to code in my 30s
Immerse, get mentorship, and don’t look back.
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The best things and stuff of 2025
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2025. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
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Gary Starkweather died on December 26, 2019
Gary Starkweather passed away on Dec 26, 2019 at the age of 81.
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Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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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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Why don't we use awnings anymore (2022)
When you look at old black and white pictures of cities from before the 1950s you may notice something on most buildings that are no longer there today. Awnings. They were ubiquitous over nearly every window of buildings from the most basic single family home to massive buildings like The White House. Where did all […]
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Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
What tacit knowledge is, and why it is the most interesting topic in the study of expertise today.
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Honda Civics and the Evil Valet
Status update, three years later
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Notes on Technical Writing
Marcus Kazmierczak's blog about code, data visualization, and life
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Learning Machine Learning: A beginner's journey
I have been learning about machine learning and deep learning (ML/DL) for the last year. I think ML/DL is here to stay. I don't think this i...
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How I stopped the RSI pain that almost destroyed my programming career
If it hurts to type you’ll have a much harder time working as a programmer. Yes, there’s voice recognition, but it’s just not the same. So when my wrist and arm pain returned soon after starting a new job I was starting to get a little scared. The last two times this happened I’d had to take months and then years off…
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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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Nootropics
Notes on nootropics I tried, and my experiments
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TODOs aren't for doing
Some teams require that every TODO comment in a codebase gets logged in the bug tracker. Others automatically delete any “stale” TODO that has been in the codebase for over a year. Don’t do it!
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I drank every cocktail
The International Bartenders Association, or IBA, maintains a list of official cocktails, ones they deem to be “the most requested recipes” at bars all around the world. It’s the closest thing the bartending industry has to a canonical list of cocktails, akin to the American Kennel Club’s registry of dog breeds or a…
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How to Learn Stuff Quickly
As software developers, we're always learning new things; it's practically the whole gig! If we can learn to quickly pick up new languages/frameworks/tools, we'll become so much more effective at our job. It's sort of a superpower.
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The Remarkable Number 1/89 (2004)
The Fibonacci series is a famous example of an object with a simple mathematical description, but a nearly inexhaustable list of bizarre and complicated properties. Originally, the series was described by Fibonacci in the 15th century in connection with the following problem:
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How To Do Less
You probably need to do fewer things right now. Prioritization, the other definition There’s two loose definitions of prioritization. Prioritization(1): Ordering a todo list. You make a giant list of things you could do, things you should do, things you’d like to do… and then you put a unique number...
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Tesla Model S: the story of a very short happiness and excitement
As an IT professional, I always felt an eager for technology and lust for new gadgets and hi-tech toys. When first electrical vehicles appeared on the roads, it was not an exception. However, lack of charging stations and high cost coupled with a need to own some backup vehicle for road trips and…
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A standing desk for $22
I’ve been interested in standing desks for a while. I keep reading things like: he who sits the most dies the soonest. All the options online are expensive. Until now. Ryan Witt and I combined our brains to see if we could come up with a better solution: Introducing
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The email they shouldn't have read
A real-world horror story about contracts, control, and the dark side of managed open source.
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