Topics /

Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 669 posts.

2023
124

Van Life in Japan

As I got better experience about van life, I published a dedicated website covering tips and tricks to enjoy Japan with a van. Check Camp In Japan for more information and guide on how to enjoy Japan in a van. It’s been already 9 months and 10,000 kilometers we are living across Japan in our […]

127

Managing Kitchen Fruit Flies with a Little Shop of Horrors

I live in Seattle on a fairly wooded property. Every summer since we’ve moved here, we end up with swarms of fruit flies in the kitchen. They congregate around the compost bin and the fruit bowl (where there are always lots of bananas). We aren’t slobbish - I do the dishes and wipe down the counters every night, take…

130

Creation happens in silence

It’s Saturday, and I’m enjoying the last sunlight for the day in my studio. The house is silent now; my family is taking a nap downstairs. And I’m here, writing, in silence. There’s a thought that kept coming in the last few weeks. As painful as it is, any creation happens in isolation without any signals or external…

135

He made linear algebra fun

Mathematics Professor Gilbert “Gil” Strang taught his last class to thousands after teaching calculus, analysis, and linear algebra for more than 60 years at MIT and online. He reflects on his life at the Institute and as an instructor with MIT OpenCourseWare.

137

Names should be cute, not descriptive

A long-standing debate between me and a peer at work has been how we should name services. His position was always that services should be named something descriptive, so that you can infer from the name what it does. My position is that the name should definitely not be descriptive, but should be something cute and…

138

Bret Victor update

Dynamicland is still going, just quietly. We closed the Oakland space for covid, but Realtalk development and collaborations have continued -- basically as originally planned, if more slowly due to our small size.

144

iCloud Drive silently deletes your content

The first time it happened, I was writing a paper. The paragraphs I had just typed vanished into thin air, faster than Time Machine or Backblaze could save them. Gone. The next occurrence was during app development; Xcode suddenly flagged numerous errors in previously error-free code. My recent changes to several…

146

The Surprising Power of Documentation

Explore the power of proper documentation in this comprehensive guide. Understand how documentation serves as a secret weapon for CTOs, eliminating guesswork, speeding up onboarding, and enhancing productivity in startups. We delve into the importance of documentation in knowledge sharing, reducing the need for…

149

Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

In late 2021, I had solar panels installed onto the roof of my house. After some bureaucratic delays, the solar panels began producing electricity for me at the beginning of January 2022. I have been tracking the performance of the panels for the last year in order to assess what the financial impact of the panels is…