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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 333 posts.
Tor in Google Summer of Code 2014
Interested in coding on Tor and getting paid for it by Google? If you are a student, we have...
Learning to Code vs Learning Computer Science
It's always very tricky when people who aren't educators start banging on about what should or shouldn't be taught in schools. My own school days are but a hazy memory of hormones, angst, and boring homework. Yet here I am, pontificating. With the current "fad" of encouraging children to learn to code, I thought I…
How My Book Launch Went
Greetings, superfans! When we last tuned in , I was just about to “launch” my self-published book . I put that in quotes because it’s an awfully serious-sounding word for what was really just doing some clicking on my laptop. If my last post was the climax of my book writing adventure, consider this the denouement…
Ikea C&D's 8-year old Ikea furniture hacking website
Updated 19 June: Read latest development (New talks). I am afraid I have a bit of bad news. Some months ago I received a Cease and Desist (C&D) letter from the agent of Inter IKEA Systems B.V., citing that my site IKEAhackers.net has infringed upon its intellectual property rights. In that letter they asked that
The Meaning of Life
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Levels of Excellence
Over on Google+, a computer scientist at McGill named Artem Kaznatcheev passed on this great description of what it’s like to learn math, written by someone who calls himself ‘man aft…
The Wolf
You’ve heard of the 10x engineer, but I am here to tell you about the Wolf. They are an engineer, and they consistently exhibit the following characteristics:
Who or What Broke My Kids?
I am DesperateI am on a desperate search to find out who or what broke my students. In fact I am so desperate that I stopped class today to ask them who broke them. Was it their parents, a former…
It's just wood
Home
Why Does A Good Kettle Cost $90+?
Yesterday morning I woke up to a house without electricity - that meant I woke up in a puddle of sweat because the fan was no longer turned on. It turned out that my housemate, while making coffee, had tripped the mains of the house. The kettle had caused the trip. It was no longer safe to use the kettle and so I had…
Rules for Learning Foreign Languages in Record Time
Preface by Tim Ferriss I’ve written about how I learned to speak, read, and write Japanese, Mandarin, and Spanish. I’ve also covered my experiments with German, Indonesian, Arabic, Norwegian, Turkish, and perhaps a dozen others. There are only few language learners who dazzle me, and Benny Lewis is one of them. This…
Adventures in Piano Building
Turning a mouse house into a musical marvel.
Melting aluminum
Today another in my ongoing, seldom-updated series of posts about building my own backyard foundry. Today I’ll describe how the final step works: actually melting and pouring the metal. First…
Working from home
The challenges of working from home full-time, and some tips on how to do so effectively.
The new X-Men movie explained in Git
I went to see X-Men: Days of Future Past last weekend. While having a heated discussion about the logic behind the time travel in the movie with fellow Rocketeer Lucas Galego, we realized that Git provides a great analogy for time travel. So here you have it, the new X-Men movie explained in Git. SPOILER ALERT If you…