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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,929 posts.
1892
The first time I was almost fired from Apple
I was hired on at Apple in October of 1995. This was what I refer to as Apple’s circling the drain period. Maybe you remember all the doomsaying — speculation that Apple was going to be shuttering soon. It’s a little odd perhaps then that they were hiring at all but apparently Apple reasoned that they nonetheless…
1893
Cultivated Disinterest in Professional Sports
Like many of my friends, I have treated professional sports with cultivated indifference. But a year and a half ago, I decided to become a football fan. Several years ago, I was at a talk by Michae…
1894
NYTimes Peru N-Word: My side of the story, in four parts
On February 5 this year, one week after an article about me appeared in the Daily Beast, The New York Times announced that I would be…
1895
Thoughtcrime
Back to: The Ultimate Tech Frontier: Your Brain | Forward to: The Evil Business Plan of Evil (and misery for all)
1896
Craft software that makes people feel something
Recently, people have been asking me why I’m pausing Boo to work on a programming language. I think it would actually be cool to write down how I feel.
1897
Visiting Chelsea Manning in prison
On the day that I am scheduled to see my friend Chelsea for the first time in six years, I wake up at 4:51pm to a shrieking fire alarm in my hotel room. Semi-conscious and disoriented, I leap out of bed and spin around wildly grabbing at all the things I care about – my phone and passport, the precious slip of paper…
1898
Resisting Cognitive Surrender
Working Notes: a commonplace notebook for recording & exploring ideas. Home . Site Map . Subscribe . More at expLog . — Kunal
1899
The Sound of Silence
I recently heard one of the more interesting insights about Silicon Valley I'd heard in a while. It explained something I’d wondered about for years. But I can't tell you what it was. There's too...
1900
Anti-patterns in software blogging
Effective writing for software developers
1901
What concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? Kayfabe (2011)
The sophisticated "scientific concept" with the greatest potential to enhance human understanding may be argued to come not from the halls of academe, but rather from the unlikely research environment of professional wrestling.
1902
My Call to Senator Schumer’s Office on PIPA: It’s So Much Worse Than I Thought
First, let me say how fantastic it is that when you call the office, a real-live human picks up the phone and can speak to you. There’s no annoying menus, no transfers, no answering machines. Washington, please don’t ever change this.
1903
How a Diode Changed My Life
When you are a child, everything seems fascinating, almost everything is magical because you don't know the boundaries of what you have to discover yet.
1904
Internet Search Tips
A description of advanced tips and tricks for effective Internet research of papers/books, with real-world examples.
1905
8,760 Hours: How to get the most out of next year
Update (December 2016): Version 2 of this guide is now available! Announcement post here. Links in this post are updated to send you to the latest and greatest version. Click here to download 8,760 Hours v2 The end of a year […]
1906
How to Stop Endless Discussions
When we find ourselves in endless debates where everyone defends their idea, we don't know how to handle the situation. We eventually find a way out, but what we need is an excellent system.
1907
My Struggle with Doom Scrolling
Reading, writing, cooking, and maybe some other random explorations.
1908
Shrinkflation, SanDisk Style
A cheap USB stick and the marketing around it caused disappointment, more at 11.
1909
Open Sauce is a confoundingly brilliant Bay Area event
This is the second year I brought my Dad (a now-retired radio engineer and co-host of Geerling Engineering) to Open Sauce, a Bay Area maker faire-like event, dreamed up by William Osman and featuring hundreds of exhibits ranging from mad science, to vintage electronics, to games, to world-record-breaking Rubik's Cube…
1910
The Remarkable Brain Waves of High Level Meditators [video]
What’s going on in the brains of people who meditate? Anecdotal evidence suggests that meditation does something to people’s minds and bodies…quiets and calms t
1911
Mentoring in Gaza's first hackathon
Engineer
1912
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…
1913
Computer Science Curriculum in 1000 YouTube Videos
This is The Entire Computer Science Curriculum in 1000 YouTube Videos. The curriculum is going to be organized in 40 courses in total, further organized in 4 academic years...
1914
Ang Lee and the uncertainty of success
Recently I was going through some old things I had put away for safekeeping, and I found these: In 1993 I interviewed film director Ang Lee before the US premiere of his second movie, “The Wedding …
1915
1916
Unlearning descriptive statistics
If you've ever used an arithmetic mean, a Pearson correlation or a standard deviation to describe a dataset, I'm writing this for you. Better numbers exist to summarize location, association and spread: numbers that are easier to interpret and that don't act up with wonky data and outliers.
1917
An OCR cliche: Into his/her anus (2009)
In order to improve the quality of my transcription of the 1879 edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I collate the text against the Google Books version. Although the OCR is faulty, it is helpful fo…
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Traveling the World on a Third World Passport
Travel the world with a third-world passport: Embrace the unfairness and overcome limitations. Here's how I traveled the world with a Thai passport.
1920
Things I Learned from Five Years in Climate Tech
Articles about systems, programming, and software engineering management written by Evan Meagher