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An open letter to Jason and David
Dear Jason and David, aka the founder-owners of Basecamp who up until 2021 earned 100% of the company’s profits along with Jeff Bezos, As you know, I am writing this while on medical leave fr…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 7,743 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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Types of Legal Argument
I have been teaching about legal reasoning and legal argumentation for years. When I do so, I try to impress upon students that legal argume...
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99 bits of unsolicited advice
UPDATE Several years ago on my 68th birthday I wrote up 68 bits of advice for my adult children, and posted them here. The bits were extremely popular, and they were widely shared by others. I was encouraged to write … Continue reading →
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A practical guide to reducing loneliness
11 easy, dorky, & life-affirming ways to connect to others — according to an introvert.
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Why do drum sets have descending toms?
Before mic’ing became a necessity, acoustic drums were just that: acoustic. And when they needed to be louder, drum manufacturers made them bigger and longer. That led to some diameter and de…
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Get better at Googling
10 Google search operators every developer should know: exact-match quotes, OR, minus, wildcards, site:, filetype:, number ranges, before: and after:.
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The “Granny Knot”
Many people are tying a “Granny Knot”, which sits crooked and comes loose. Learn the “one simple trick” for keeping your shoes neatly and securely tied.
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Your Book Review: Progress And Poverty
Finalist #3 of the book review contest
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Internet Search Tips
A description of advanced tips and tricks for effective Internet research of papers/books, with real-world examples.
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What’s the origin of the phrase “big data doesn’t fit in excel”?
Welcome to Yak Shaving School! As part of my MSc I'm reading a book about Data Analytics. So I've been chasing down quotes to find their origin. One paper had this popular quote in it (emphasis added): As with many rapidly emerging concepts, Big Data has been variously defined and operationalized, ranging from trite…
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When 70M people visit your joke site
What happens when 70 million people visit your joke site?
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How to Write a Technical Book
Are you particularly well versed in a field? Why not write a book? I've summarized the 4 main steps to writing and publishing your first technical book.
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How to Read Books When You Have ADHD
Do you have lots of unfinished books? Here is a new ADHD friendly approach to reading books
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What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t (2010)
If you regularly read cognitive science or psychology blogs (or even just the lowly New York Times!), you’ve probably heard of something called the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger e…
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Marbles (2016)
Let us start with an assumption that most of us already suspect to be true: that civilization will not survive more than a few centuries into the future. If that sad assertion be true, then what will the earth look like in the far future? There was a television show some years ago entitled “Life After People”. It did…
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Some Thoughts on Smart Canes
over the last few years, many attempts have been made at creating a smart cane. None of them have successfully lead to a market transforming technology that's actually used by any substantial users. I
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Embrace the Grind
Sometimes, programming feels like magic: you chant some arcane incantation and a fleet of robots do your bidding. But sometimes, magic is mundane. If you’re willing to embrace the grind, you can pull off the impossible.
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Programming is hard
Most beginners in programming eventually end up with the same ingratiating message: „Programming is easy, everyone can do it”, with some threatening message that people doing the gatekeeping should stop doing that. I’m here to tell you that that is not true. Programming is hard, programming is not for everyone, and…
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Teaching Machiavelli through his letters
Hello! It’s been a while since I posted since, as usual, many projects press, so it’s rare for me to have the time to write the kinds of polished essays I like sharing here. But I’ve been hoping to share more things, since a lot of the history work I’ve been doing lately has helped me with reflecting on current…
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“Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors
Note: I link to a bunch of paywalled studies in this essay. Please do not use sci-hub to access them for free and do not use this trick (a) to easily redirect papers to sci-hub. For the clearest example of deliberate data manipulation, see how Walker edits out the data that contradicts his argument from the graph…
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Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
This article is part of a series: Seven years later, I bought a new Macbook. For the first time, I don't love it How I moved my setup from a Mac to a Linux laptop This article The M1 Macbook Air, one year later Due to very bad
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Apple doesn't care about album cover art
Album covers have never been smaller.