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Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,929 posts.

Any year
1621

How to keep someone with you forever

So you want to keep your lover or your employee close. Bound to you, even. You have a few options. You could be the best lover theyve ever had, kind, charming, thoughtful, competent, witty, and a tiger in bed. You could be the best workplace theyve ever had, with challenging work, rewards…

1622

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…

1625

Don’t point out something wrong immediately

This is not a post on a technical topic, but rather on a common pitfall for engineers – we like to point out something wrong the moment we see it. Understandably, we are very good at it. We are basically trained for it. When it comes to code reviews, or design reviews for complicated distributed system protocols, we…

1629

A system to help you remember more of what you read

Five years ago I realized that I remembered almost nothing about most books that I read. I was reading all kinds of non-fiction - pop-psychology, pop-economics, pop-sociology, you name it - and felt like quite the polymath auto-didact. But one day, after I had finished blathering at a friend about how much I had…

1637

Programming languages that blew my mind (2023)

I’ve been a programmer since the age of 8, and some kind of developer for most of my life. Throughout my life as a coder, both hobbyist and professional, I’ve learnt plenty of programming languages that felt like cookie-cutter clones of each other, but also a few programming languages that changed the way I looked at…

1642

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 […]

1648

A bad day at the office

While looking for something else, I came across this rather incredible photo in the Imperial War Museum collection. That's a seaplane stuck 300 feet up a 350ft tall radio mast! If that's not amazing enough, the pilot was rescued by three men who climbed up to retrieve him. And he survived.