The key realization from that post: spending less and saving more helps you retire early not just because you're saving faster, but because you need less to retire: your retirement savings only has to support your expenses, not replace your full income.
"I won't be able to answer all your questions. Rather, I can show you how to be lost productively, and how to become comfortable not knowing things and teaching yourself." -- David Humphrey, Mozilla developer, http://vocamus.net/dave/?p=60
It's one of the most valuable skills you'll need to excel in a technical field, and when mentoring others its one of the most critical skills to impart.
Kejia Zhu (http://kzhu.net/does-life-end-at-35.html) helped me to get through the delusional obsession for quick success. I gave it to read to all my friends and it's definitely a must for all HN folks.
The good ol' Raymond's How to Become a Hacker (http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html) will teach you the Hacker attitude, which you can apply to anything. It doesn't matter whether you're a programmer or not, either way you'll benefit from it.
"1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.
2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.
3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.
4. Freedom is good.
5. Attitude is no substitute for competence."
A Handyman’s Toolbox (http://ninjasandrobots.com/a-handymans-toolbox) taught me not to always chase the hot new tech and be confident in my skills. It may be common sense, but it's also well written and straight to the point.
Lastly, the following posts are all about traveling and/or alternative lifestyles. They show different POVs, but are all equally inspirational.
A brilliant article which lets you know that coding is hard cause it's hard not cause you are stupid and that something can be hard and fun at the same time.
One last essay that I have enjoyed, also too old to be a blog post, is W.M. Turski's "I was a computer". It's here on Elsevier but fortunately it looks to be open access.
Paul Graham's How to make wealth: very very nice article. A must read for everyone. The part where he writes about leverage as a characteristic of technology jobs and it being the only way of multiplying your productivity (or diminishing it) is very illustrative.
"Could I be as good as them, if not better? Had I fulfilled my potential, or did I have more to give? Had I pushed my mind and body to the limit? If not, what were those limits? What stars was I capable of grabbing? Without giving it a shot I would never know. I never want to look back and say ‘what if’."
A transcript of the brilliant speech by Heinz von Foerster titled "Ethics and Second Order Cybernetics". When I read this I found it truly amazing, because it effortlessly connected the existential questions I was facing with the formalism of mathematics and the insight of the humanities, all tied into a beautiful circle.
"Lessons from Habitat" [1], by Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer.
Not inspirational in the strict sense, but it's amazing to see a paper written more than 20 years ago and still with so many applicable insights in terms of psychology in gaming and virtual worlds. I keep going back and re-reading every couple of years.
Every time I read something Paul Graham wrote before he became The Godfather I get sad. It may not show in the quality of moderation we see on HN, but he's clearly an extremely talented man.
Yep, and I think the quality of his essays dropped recently. Before he became "The Godfather" his writing was really some out of the box thinking, while the recent ones seem to me almost like an ad to go to SV and get funded by YC to try to build the next Facebook.
- "You and your research" by Hamming, and his video lectures which expand on topics in the original talk:
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30
- "On teaching mathematics" by V. I. Arnold:
http://pauli.uni-muenster.de/~munsteg/arnold.html
- "Undergraduation" by Paul Graham
http://www.paulgraham.com/college.html
- "Learn and relearn your field", and many others in the same category, by Terrence Tao
http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/learn-and-relear...
- Steve Jobs Stanford commencement address:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc
- All articles on programming by Peter Norvig:
http://www.norvig.com/