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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 913 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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5-HTTLPR: A Pointed Review
In 1996, some researchers discovered that depressed people often had an unusual version of the serotonin transporter gene 5-HTTLPR. The study became a psychiatric sensation, getting thousands of ci…
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Pelicans on a bicycle
I decided to roll out my own LLM benchmark: how well can different models render an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle? I chose that because a) I like …
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GPG and Me (2015)
I receive a fair amount of email from strangers. My email address is public, which doesn’t seemto be a popular choice these days, but I’ve received enough inspiring correspondence over the yearsto leave it be.When I receive a GPG encrypted email from a stranger, though, I immediately get the fee...
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My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
The biggest transition for me when I started college was learning to get organized. There was a point when I couldn't just remember everything in my head. And having to constantly keep track of things was distracting me from whatever task I was doing at the moment.
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This Page is Designed to Last
The end of the year is an opportunity to clean up and reset for the upcoming new semester. I found myself clearing out old bookmarks—yes, bookmarks: that formerly beloved browser feature that seems to have lost the battle to 'address bar autocomplete'. But this nostalgic act of tidying led me to despair.
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Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight
Around The World and Back Again20111,017 points482 commentscited by 8Tech Industry & Business details
Somewhere around 1:00 am yesterday, my Airbnb.com horror story was picked up by Hacker News ; to say this story has gone viral in the past ...
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Music theory for nerds
Not music nerds, obviously. I don’t know anything about music. I know there are letters but sometimes the letters have squiggles; I know an octave doubles in pitch; I know you can write a pop song with only four chords. That’s about it. The rest has always seemed completely, utterly arbitrary. Why do we have twelve…
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I've locked myself out of my digital life
Imagine… Last night, lightning struck our house and burned it down. I escaped wearing only my nightclothes. In an instant, everything was vaporised. Laptop? Cinders. Phone? Ashes. Home server? A smouldering wreck. Yubikey? A charred chunk of gristle. This presents something of a problem. In order to recover my digital…
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I Lost Faith in Kagi
Issues with Kagi's AI focus, finances and leadership
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Things that aren't doing the thing
Preparing to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
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Happy people don’t leave jobs they love
Resignations happen in a moment, and it’s not when you declare, “I’m resigning.” The moment happened a long time ago when you received a random email from a goo
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After 15 years of practice..
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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How you eat corn on the cob predicts whether you're an analyst or algebraist
I like learning about odd connections between disparate things. This probably is the oddest example that I know. Broadly speaking, mathemat...
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Obvious to you. Amazing to others.
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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Administrative Purgatory
your case is still going through administrative processing and we don't know when that process will be completed. Last year I was denied to go to the US when I was about to travel to San Francisco. Me and my employer's legal team never got answers as to why this happened so I've personally tried … Continue reading…
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Aaron Swartz on illness and depression
I’m sorry I haven’t been keeping up with Bubble City. I’ve spent a lot of the last few weeks lying in bed and drinking fluids. (With occasional breaks to play Rock Band, much to the annoyance of my neighbors.) Once again, I’ve been sick — this time, with four different illnesses.
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The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information
Learn how to organize your digital life in seconds. Stop wasting time looking for information and gain greater focus on what matters most.
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Typing Is Hard
Type checking is the process of taking a given program in some programming language and working out whether all variables and expressions have the correct types, i.e. strings are assigned to strings, arithmetic expressions involve only numbers, etc. Some languages also offer type inference , tasking the compiler with…
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Memrefuting
(in which I bring this blog back to the “safe, uncontroversial” territory of arguing with people who think they can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time) A few people have aske…
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