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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 369 posts.
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Solve Less General Problems
Two decades ago when I first started working at Avid, one of the tasks I was assigned was porting our product (a consumer video editor - th...
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The worst distractions are the ones we love
In this interview, author James Clear discusses the biggest issues facing the modern worker, from how to clear away the noise to finding the values that motivate you every day.
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The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood
The paper Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure , by A. Pluchino. A. E. Biondo, and A. Rapisarda, has been receiving a lot of positive reception lately.
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The Big List of RPG Plots
What follows is a scrap of trivia . . . my collection of RPG plots , in abstract form. I built this by examining the premises of hundreds o...
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Skill Stacking: A Practical Strategy to Achieve Career Success
Skill stacking is a strategy that you can use to achieve career success. You can use it whether you want to build a business or have a dream job.
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Thoughts on, and pictures of, the original Macintosh User Manual
I recently purchased an original Macintosh User Manual (thanks eBay !). I had seen one at a garage sale, and was struck by how it had to explain a total paradigm shift in interacting with computers. I figured I could learn something about helping make innovation happen.
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The Feynman Technique: The Best Way to Learn Anything (2012)
Master the Feynman Technique: Nobel laureate's 4-step learning method to understand anything deeply through teaching, simplification, and systematic review.
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Review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now
It’s not every day that I check my office mailbox and, amid the junk brochures, find 500 pages on the biggest questions facing civilization—all of them, basically—by possibly the …
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Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker
Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker : Effectively speaking, I've always been a Vim user. When I got my first shell account, I started with Vim (In the Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic ages of `vi`, `vim` and `neovim`, I came of age somewhere in the late Jurassic): my
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Why you need both rituals and routines to power your workday
Routines aren't the only thing we need for a balanced life. Most of us spend our days switching tasks and it’s our rituals that help us get through them.
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Another Week with Bad Software
In the midst of my September job hop I headed to Kazan for the weekend. I don't know exactly why — probably because I could. I had a hotel booked via booking.com, but once I arrived there the receptionist told me it was the first time he's heard of my booking, and he told me that they had no more rooms, and he told me…
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Invisible asymptotes
"It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle." -
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Myth of the Brown Recluse
Myth of the Brown Recluse: Fact, Fear, and Loathing Rick Vetter Department of Entomology, University of California, Riverside, CA
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What I Learned from a Taipei Alley
I was in Taipei the past few weeks working on a documentary with friends. Because of a busy schedule, it wasn't like my usual travels abroad for fun, it felt more like a work trip. Still, even if I'd been there purely for vacation, I would've wanted to try a different mode of travel, one less focuse
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How to explain infinity to kids
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Technical Writing: Learning from Kernighan
I have in front of me two books that immediately struck me with their similarity: The c Programming Language 1 1 The c Programming Language ; Kernighan & Ritchie; Prentice Hall; 1988. and The awk Programming Language 2 2 The awk Programming Language ; Aho, Kernighan & Weinberger; Addison-Wesley; 1988. Available…
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Solving My Email Problem
Email is not a messaging protocol. It’s a TODO list. Or at least my inbox is a TODO list and email is the protocol for putting stuff on it. Here’s the problem. It is a s**tty TODO list. Any one of you can put something on my TODO list. And I don’t want that.
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Making Penicillin at Home
This article explains how to make antibiotics at home in the event of a collapse situation
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From macOS to Windows and WSL
Writings about computing, agents, and the Internet.
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Frequent versus infrequent developers, in languages and so on
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Today is Esperanto Day – here’s why I learned it
Hey, it's Zamenhofa Tago, otherwise known as Esperanto Book Day. Read on to learn more about the international language and why it's so cool.
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The Surprising Power of the Long Game
In everything we do, we play the long or the short game. The short game is easy, pleasurable, and offers visible and immediate benefits. But it almost never leads to success. Here's how to play the long game.
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Reversing the effects of long programming sessions
Programming for long periods is like walking a high tight rope for a really, really long period of time, or at least I imagine it is... ...
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