When I was 13 I read ESR’s how to become a hacker and it changed my life.. I followed the instructions starting with c++ then linux and that’s basically how I got into coding!
Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?
41–50 of 393 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?
#42Aphantasia: How it feels to be blind in your mind By Blake Ross https://m.facebook.com/nt/screen/?params=%7B%22note_id%22%3A... Before reading this post I had no idea I had aphantasia and thought everyone else was the same as me, unable to see anything when they closed their eyes. This helped me understand myself and my relationships so much better than ever before. Thanks Blake!
That's very interesting and the term "aphantasia" only got coined in 2015, so it looks like a fresh area of research.
Do you think that there are some advantages to being this way? For example, being able to live more "in the moment"?
Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?
#43I like re-reading this once every few months, and taking stock of how little I've internalised it: https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-y...
I wish I could find an archive of Jason Pargin's old writings back from when he ran PointlessWasteOfTime.com under the David Wong handle. The Monkeysphere was a brilliant essay.
https://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?
#44I like re-reading this once every few months, and taking stock of how little I've internalised it: https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-y...
You might want to rethink aligning your life to a Cracked listicle, in particular this one. For example:
> For instance, some people want to respond to that speech with Tyler Durden's line from Fight Club: "You are not your job." But, well, actually, you totally are.
Well, actually, you totally aren't. The next part is even worse and downright dehumanizing:
> you are nothing more than the sum total of your useful skills [...] Your "job" -- the useful thing you do for other people -- is all you are.
It's not a good idea to view yourself as purely a means to an end for other people. I'm strongly in favor of being a useful and productive part of society, but not to the point where nothing remains of your person except for an exploitable resource for others.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?
#45I don't look back on it that fondly nowadays, but it would probably be Mr Money Mustache's classic "The Simple Math of Early Retirement". I am not on a path to FIRE really, but in my early twenties it was really incredibly eye-opening. At that age, I had very much assumed that the world had to work according to "work hard for 45 years, get the biggest house you can, buy as much stuff as you can, on your 65th birthday…
Honestly I find the whole movement quite dreary if taken too seriously. Of course, don't spend on frivolous things. Do you really need the designer bag, instead of just a bag? Do you need that road-trip with your friends in your 20s? Do you really need to impress that boy/girl by taking them to a michelin restaurant for a date? OTOH what is the opportunity, and life cost of being frugal or too frugal? Perhaps the des…
> Honestly I find the whole movement quite dreary if taken too seriously.
FIRE content is best consumed in tiny doses. You can get 95% of what you need to know from a few blog posts, the Bogleheads Wiki, and creating a simple spreadsheet of your financial planning. That’s it.
The problem is that FIRE has become a magnet for people who are miserable and think retirement will solve all of their problems. This subset of FIRE people see their job as the source of all of their misery and have glorified the idea of FIRE as the only escape hatch. They think they’ll be finally be happy just as soon as they can save enough money (from the job they hate) and reduce their expenses (by ruthlessly cutting spending, even on things they enjoy) until the lines intercept on their FIRE projections.
There are many people following a FIRE path who don’t fit this stereotype, but those people aren’t the ones hanging out on FIRE forums discussing FIRE all day. The people who obsess over FIRE and want to create threads to trash talk their neighbors who had the audacity to go on an expensive vacation or write about how little they spent on food last year by eating lentils every day are predominantly the ones talking about it all the time. There just isn’t much to talk about once you’ve identified a retirement equilibrium target and established a plan, so most of the reasonable participants don’t bother hanging out in the FIRE communities.
There are exceptions to everything, of course, but I found that most real-world FIRE people I know don’t want anything to do with internet FIRE communities or MMM.
Finances are something that should enable the life you want, not something that should become the primary focus of your discussions, readings, and online discourse all of the time.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?
#46https://blog.tjcx.me/p/consume-less-create-more
This article inspired me on two things :
1) Lots of the things I do in everyday life is just to consume: buying, watching, following, etc. These things either consume my money, or my time. These things make me feel good, but it does not generate real value. In order to get rich, I need to create things. I also start to realize that great people are great because they started to create things at a very early stage of their life (but not consuming things as they advocate, think about celebrities, entrepreneurs etc), so they are able to practice and perfect the value creating skills to the extreme.
2) I start to realize that the world is binary in nature : I create to sell, I buy to consume. I either at the buyer side, or at the seller side. And in this current society, there is a huge buyer side trap, the whole idea of consumerism and social media is to trap you inside the buyer side, so you keep buying, you keep consuming. I really need to break free from this trap.
This blog post was written before COVID-19, but the idea feels even fresher during this pandemic era
Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?
#47Beating the Averages by pg:
http://paulgraham.com/avg.html
He planted the idea of "The Blub Paradox" in my head, which years later made me look at Git and version control through a different lens. Eventually I co-founded a company (Sturdy YCW21) making collaborating on code better.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?
#48http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2014/07/instant-pot-el... If you see cooking primarily as a means of getting nutrients rather than a hobby, I very strongly recommend getting an electric pressure cooker. It greatly simplifies cooking because it's automated. Just add the ingredients, close the lid, press a button, and wait. You will get a perfectly cooked one-pot meal with minimum effort. You can even mix fresh a…
First time I see this post (thanks for sharing!). I bought one of these 2 years ago and it was life changing indeed. Stuffing it with vegetables and meat before going to the gym; come back and everything is done.
About boring food; it might not be crispy, but you can make amazing meats in it. Try slow cooking pork collar boneless[0] with honey and mustard.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?
#49Life changing in that it changed my professional life. Steve Yegge's piece that all programmers are typists, http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirties.... It's been a while since I read it but my recollection of it is that your tools matter and that you need to practice to get good in using your tools. Prior to reading this I was so focused on solving "the problem" that I never realized that I spent a lot of mental energy on the tools rather that was much better spent on solving whatever I worked on. This realization has changed how I approach technical stuff in my day-to-day job.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?
#50I like re-reading this once every few months, and taking stock of how little I've internalised it: https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-y...
Maybe the Glengarry Glen Ross "closing" scene would have a positive impact on me and get me fired up if the profession was something in tech, at a company whose mission I cared about. Otherwise, as the article mentions, I do indeed just think Alec Baldwin's character is a borderline sociopathic asshole.