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Life, Learning & Writing

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

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1925

No one cared about my spreadsheets

The most painful part of writing The Case Against Education was calculating the return to education. I spent fifteen months working on the spreadsheets. I came up with the baseline case, did scores of “variations on a theme,” noticed a small mistake or blind alley, then started over. Several programmer friends advised…

1926

Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks

Tim Ferriss Intro Hundreds of people have asked me about Soylent, a controversial Silicon Valley team trying to replace food with a grayish liquid. “Does it really deliver all the nutrients the human body needs?” “Is it safe?” “Why hasn’t anyone tried this before?” [Hint: they have] And most often: “What do you think…

1931

Bird brains (2023)

A kea parrot in New Zealand learned to drag traffic cones onto a highway so cars would stop and humans would feed it. That sent me down a rabbit hole on how we actually measure bird intelligence.

1933

Build stuff

Extending on the about page, I want to emphasise even more the importance of creating personal projects, having independent work and going far beyond what a degree might teach you. Just so that we are on the same page, I will not take into consideration the reason for choosing a Computer Science degree, nor the money…

1934

Life in a Studio Apartment with My Wife and Two Sons

Between July 2011 and August 2015 I lived in a ~400sqft studio apartment in San Francisco. I moved in a bachelor but by the time I moved out, I was one member of a four person family. Here are some things I learned along the way. Lesson 1) Rent control has strange side effects San Francisco has a rent control policy…

1935

Why am I interested in Elixir?

I’ve had Elixir on the brain recently. And by recently I probably mean 2 years. In my defense I think it is fair to say it is blooming right now. I haven’t had much need of it, or opportunity for it, in my day-to-day of maintaining a Python legacy system, renewing another legacy or optimizing Elasticsearch. So I’ve…

1937

Using an engineering notebook

One of my core software engineering practices is writing, by hand, in a physical notebook [1] . It's one of the most important things I do to remain productive and effective. Maybe the single most important. And it's a practice that I see very few others using!

1941

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…

1946

EmacsConf 2024 Notes

The videos have been uploaded , thank-you notes have been sent, and the kiddo has decided to play a little Minecraft on her own, so now I get to write some quick notes on EmacsConf 2024 .