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Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 333 posts.

2014
154

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…

155

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…

158

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

160

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…

166

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:

171

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…

174

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…

177

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…

179

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…