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Ask HN: What are your favorite articles/blog posts of all time?

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11–20 of 38 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite articles/blog posts of all time?

#11
57 startup lessons from Slava Akhmechet:

http://www.defmacro.org/2013/07/23/startup-lessons.html

I don't think I've ever seen such an accurate, shrewd, and insightful collection of startup wisdom in one place before. Every bullet point in this list could be a book.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite articles/blog posts of all time?

#12
When I'm feeling down or burned out I used to read "Good and Bad Procrastination"[0].

When I need inspiration I go read "How to Make Wealth"[1].

During my day job where I'm required to study specifications, I found "The Feynman Technique"[2] to be useful in understanding the subject quickly.

From time to time I also read "The Best of edw519: A Hacker News Top Contributor"[3].

I just repeatedly read articles and posts that I like:

[0] - http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

[1] - http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

[2] - http://calnewport.com/blog/2012/10/26/mastering-linear-algeb...

[3] - https://web.archive.org/web/20160304034949/http://v25media.s...

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite articles/blog posts of all time?

#15

When I'm feeling down or burned out I used to read "Good and Bad Procrastination"[0]. When I need inspiration I go read "How to Make Wealth"[1]. During my day job where I'm required to study specifications, I found "The Feynman Technique"[2] to be useful in understanding the subject quickly. From time to time I also read "The Best of edw519: A Hacker News Top Contributor"[3]. I just repeatedly read articles and posts…

In regards to [1] on wealth, what are your (and everyone else's) thoughts on the following:

> But a very able person who does care about money will ordinarily do better to go off and work with a small group of peers.

That's saying that you'll make more money if you go work (or start) a startup, whereas I've seen some opposite sentiment on HN (don't have specific links, sorry) where people say your expected monetary returns will be higher at GOOG/FB or other big companies because of the high failure chance of startups.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite articles/blog posts of all time?

#17
The problem is "Write a C program of 512 characters or less that returns as large a number as possible." This fantastic reddit comment[0] led me down a rabbit hole that I still haven't dug my way out of.

[0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/csuey/write_a_...

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite articles/blog posts of all time?

#19

When I'm feeling down or burned out I used to read "Good and Bad Procrastination"[0]. When I need inspiration I go read "How to Make Wealth"[1]. During my day job where I'm required to study specifications, I found "The Feynman Technique"[2] to be useful in understanding the subject quickly. From time to time I also read "The Best of edw519: A Hacker News Top Contributor"[3]. I just repeatedly read articles and posts…

In regards to [1] on wealth, what are your (and everyone else's) thoughts on the following: > But a very able person who does care about money will ordinarily do better to go off and work with a small group of peers. That's saying that you'll make more money if you go work (or start) a startup, whereas I've seen some opposite sentiment on HN (don't have specific links, sorry) where people say your expected monetary r…

I think Gates, even if he had to give an exclusive license to IBM for DOS, would have come up with an operating system for the other computer companies demanding one. Paul Graham is wrong on how this would have played out.

Gates already had the business model in place for licensing basic to computer manufacturers. It's easy to see he would have extended that to some DOS-like operating system.

Indeed he went onto do precisely that with Windows, leaving OS/2 to IBM and failure.

PG called this one wrong. Gates would still have come to own the industry as he did, whether or not the DOS deal with IBM was exclusive. The computer industry was always set to expand and Gates was always the guy to meet the demand. Gary Kildall had shown by this stage he didn't have what it took to pick up every commercial opportunity offered.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite articles/blog posts of all time?

#20
There is a well known open ended interview question - "what happens when you type a url in a browser and hit enter?". I have many a times imagined (I have never been asked this exact question) overwhelming the interviewer with details, that comes in waves, by going deeper and deeper, by asking rhetorical questions like "but what happens there" loudly and not caring what he answers, almost channeling Sheldon Cooper. In this fun scenario , I restricted myself to network stack of the OS and routing mechanism. However, I recently found this article http://danluu.com/navigate-url/ that is much more hardcore. It is now one of my favorite, if not all time.
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