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Even God Couldn't Beat Dollar-Cost Averaging
A market timing strategy rarely outperforms dollar cost averaging even when that strategy knows exactly when to buy.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 70 posts.
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Ketamine: Now By Prescription
Last week the FDA approved esketamine for treatment-resistant depression. Let’s review how the pharmaceutical industry works: a company discovers and patents a potentially exciting new drug. …
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Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)
Applied Computer Science: On Murder Considered As STEM Field—using information theory to quantify the magnitude of Light Yagami’s mistakes in 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡𝘩 𝑁𝑜𝑡𝑒 and considering fixes
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Fuck Your 90 Day Exercise Window (2016)
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
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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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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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BLUF: A military standard to make writing more powerful
BLUF is a military communications acronym — it stands for “bottom line up front” — that’s designed to enforce speed and clarity in reports and emails.
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In Defense of Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman has had a rough month. This article is a decent summary of the events. In short: Stallman made some technically-correct-but-utterly-tactless comments on a private mailing list, most…
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If you're busy, you're doing something wrong (2011)
The Berlin Study In the early 1990s, a trio of psychologists descended on the Universität der Künste, a historic arts academy in the heart of West ... Read more
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Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated
Most people have an extremely incorrect perception about waste disposal and recycling. Here’s the reality.
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I was seven words away from being spear-phished
Three weeks ago I received a very flattering email from the University of Cambridge, asking me to judge the Adam Smith Prize for Economics:
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I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
7 years ago I wrote an article about speed reading. Turns out I made a lot of mistakes. Discover why speed reading might not be as useful as expected.
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Climbing the Wealth Ladder
On the 6 levels of wealth and why affluence increases in steps.
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Some people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely
[Related to: Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain, HPPD And The Specter Of Permanent Side Effects] I. Hallucinogen persisting perceptual disorder is a condition where people wh…
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Cancer Progress: Much More Than You Wanted To Know (2018)
Official statistics say we are winning the War on Cancer. Cancer incidence rates, mortality rates, and five-year-survival rates have generally been moving in the right direction over the past few d…
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I Survived the “Destroying Angel” (2006)
This memoir of a near-fatal mushroom poisoning was written by our most fortunate guest, Richard Eshelman. Happy Thanksgiving, all.
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The Best Magazine Articles Ever (2012)
The following are suggestions for the best magazine articles (in English) ever. Stars denote how many times a correspondent has suggested it. Submitter comments are in italics. For a great way to read long-form magazine articles on a tablet device see my review of LongForm and Instapaper here .
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Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure
Some of Stephen Wolfram’s “productivity hacks” to make his days and projects more productive. Daily life, desk environment, outside the office, presentation setup, filesystem organization, Wolfram Notebook systems, databases, personal analytics.
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On whether changes in bedroom CO2 levels affect sleep quality
Self-experiment on whether changes in bedroom CO₂ levels affect sleep quality
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A three-page paper that shook philosophy, with lessons for software engineers
In 1963, the philosopher Edmund Gettier published a three-page paper in the journal Analysis that quickly became a classic in the field. Epistemologists going back to the Greeks had debated what it meant to know something, and in the Enlightenment, a definition was settled upon: to know something is to have a…
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How I Almost Destroyed a £50M War Plane and the Normalisation of Deviance (2016)
‘RECOVER!’ came the shout from the back seat of my Tornado GR4 combat jet but it wasn’t necessary - I had already started…
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They Might Never Tell You It’s Broken
They Might Never Tell You It's Broken
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Biomarker for chronic fatigue syndrome identified
Stanford scientists devised a blood-based test that accurately identified people with chronic fatigue syndrome, a new study reports.
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How to Find Hidden Cameras in Your Airbnb
How to Find Hidden Cameras in your AirBNB, Author: Johannes Ullrich
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Adventures in Netflix
I’ve been watching a buttload of 40s movies over the past few months, and I was thinking about watching something really modern next. And then it occurred to me: How about if I watch all R…
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