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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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2283

Estimating square roots in your head

Imagine we want to compute the square root of a number n n n . The basic idea of Heron’s method , named after the mathematician and engineer, Heron of Alexandria, is to find a number g g g that is close to n \sqrt{n} n ​ and to then average that with the number n / g n/g n / g , which corrects for the fact that g g g…

2286

Hacking The Status Game

I was taking an improv class, and the instructor gave us a game to play before getting on stage, so that we can turn off our over-rationalizing minds and get into the flow. The game was called Status , and it went like this:

2291

40 Days Without Booze

Recently, as a “kick-in-the-butt” motivator, I promised myself that I would abstain from alcoholic beverages until I finished the first draft of a novel I’ve been working on. I had set a target date for completing the project (June 30th), with the idea that if I didn’t finish by that date, I’d stop drinking booze […]

2300

Software essays that shaped me

I started reading software blogs before I got my first programming job 20 years ago. At this point, I've read thousands of blog posts and essays, but a small handful stuck in my mind and changed the way I think about software.

2303

I learned Haskell in just 15 years

Haskell is a programming language invented sometime in the 20th century by Scottish logicians as a prank. ¹ Fifteen years or so ago, for reasons I can no longer remotely recall, I started learning Haskell. Now, I have finally written a useful program in Haskell, and I am pretty sure I can do it again, if I ever need…

2308

But yak shaving is fun (2019)

KO | EN | Discussions on HN Alexandr frolov (CC BY-SA 4.0) This blog doesn’t use a static site generator or framework like Jekyll, Hugo, or Gatsby. I tried a few of them at first, but they gave me too little freedom to customize, so I decided to build the blog myself. Early on I just wrote posts in ...