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The answer to "Will you mentor me?" is...No.
No. Thanks for understanding. Ok that was the nutshell version. If that answers your question, that's great. The more detailed answer ...
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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Jeff Varasano's NY Pizza Recipe (2008)
One of the 'Elite 8' Pizzerias in the US by Every Day with Rachael Ray One of America's Perfect Pizzeria's: Zagat And Many Other Awards Main Restaurant Website
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Programming blogs
This is one of those “N technical things every programmer must read” lists, except that “programmer” is way too broad a term and the styles of writing people find helpful for them are too different for any such list to contain a non-zero number of items (if you want the entire list to be helpful to everyone). So…
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Learn difficult concepts with the ADEPT method (2014)
After a decade of writing explanations, I've simplified the strategy I use to get new concepts to click. Here's how to teach yourself a difficult idea, or…
548
The Four Hobbies, and Apparent Expertise
Around the end of high school, I started to get really into photography. My friend (let’s call him T) was also into it, which should have been great fun. But it wasn’t. Going shooting with him was never great, for a reason I didn’t figure out till much later. I wanted to take photos. T mostly enjoyed tinkering with…
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The Socratic Method: Teaching by Asking Instead of by Telling
The following is a transcript of a teaching experiment, using the Socratic method, with a regular third grade class in a suburban elementary school. I present my perspective and views on the session, and on the Socratic method as a teaching tool, following the transcript. The class was conducted on a Friday afternoon…
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I'm a phony. Are you?
pho·ny also pho·ney (fō'nē) adj. pho·ni·er, pho·ni·est 1. a. Not genuine or ...
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Toast
Toast was my first published short story collection. It's now effectively out of print — there was going to be a limited, signed, "final" edition, but I haven't seen hide nor hair of it for a year or two now — so I'm releasing it under a Creative Commons license.
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Teaching Linear Algebra
In a recent Hacker News post I made reference to an interesting teaching experience I had in the mid-90s. This is a longer explanation of ...
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Culturally transmitted skills and values
Three major tools that companies have to influence behavior are incentives, process, and culture. People often mean different things when talking about these, so I'll provide an example of each so we're on the same page (if you think that I should be using a different word for the concept, feel free to mentally…
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Developing Developers (2015)
As of Fall 2025, Northeastern’s College of Computer Science will replace this curriculum with a set of new courses, starting with Python in the first year.
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My Favorite Liar (2008)
[the following recounts an exceptionally powerful teaching technique employed by an economics professor of mine at university; teaching fact-checking and skepticism by salting it into the content of his delivery]
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How My Book Launch Went
Greetings, superfans! When we last tuned in , I was just about to “launch” my self-published book . I put that in quotes because it’s an awfully serious-sounding word for what was really just doing some clicking on my laptop. If my last post was the climax of my book writing adventure, consider this the denouement…
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Hacking strength: Gaining muscle with least resistance
Then, after realizing I was too weak to lift my son and his wheelchair in and out of the car, I spent just over a year gaining strength and muscle.
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Personhood: A Game for Two or More Players
Being a person is not the essence of humanity, only... one of its many masks. — John Gray
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Merlin Mann: Better
Merlin's essay on the web, attention, and the virtues of trying a little bit harder.
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Paul Buchheit: Communicating with code
Some people can sell their ideas with a brilliant speech or a slick powerpoint presentation. I can't. Maybe that's why I'm skeptical of idea...
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Malthusianisms
(See also: Umeshisms, Anthropicisms) Why, in real life, do we ever encounter hard instances of NP-complete problems? Because if it’s too easy to find a 10,000-mile TSP tour, we ask for a 9,0…
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Trapped priors as a basic problem of rationality
P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.
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Vim Koans
These koans have been independently translated into Chinese (archived) , thanks to Wanzhang Sheng, and into Spanish (archived) , thanks to Daniel Campoverde Carrión.
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How to write a novel using the snowflake method (2013)
How to write a novel: Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson teaches his wildly popular Snowflake Method for designing and writing a novel.
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Lean into the pain
When you first begin to exercise, it’s somewhat painful. Not wildly painful, like touching a hot stove, but enough that if your only goal was to avoid pain, you certainly would stop doing it. But if you keep exercising… well, it just keeps getting more painful. When you’re done, if you’ve really pushed yourself, you…
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Varieties of Argumentative Experience
In 2008, Paul Graham wrote How To Disagree Better, ranking arguments on a scale from name-calling to explicitly refuting the other person’s central point. And that’s why, ever since 200…