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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 7,743 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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Ursula K. Le Guin on “Spare Time”
In praise of the mundane, unquantifiable, impractical activities that feed creative work and fill life with meaning.
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Kaggle Learn review: there is a deep learning track and it is worth your time
Right from my undergrad days when I was starting out with machine learning to this date, my admiration for Kaggle continues to grow. In addition to being synonymous with and popularizing data scien…
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Conflict vs. Mistake
Jacobite – which is apparently still a real magazine and not a one-off gag making fun of Jacobin – summarizes their article Under-Theorizing Government as “You’ll never hear…
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Printing and binding your own books and manuals (2003)
Despite the wealth of on-screen documentation available, like many people I still feel the need to print things out for reference or study. For most people, printing out a manual means putting up with a bunch of A4 or Letter-sized pages with a staple through the corner, which doesn't seem much good to me. Instead I…
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How to Study: A Brief Guide
which has numerous links to other helpful Web sites (indicated in some printed versions by underlined phrases).
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Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
My dad emigrated from Colombia to North America when he was 18 looking looking for a better life. For my brother and I that meant a lot of standing outside in the cold. My dad’s preferred method of improving his lot was improving lots, and my brother and I were “voluntarily” recruited to help working on the buildings…
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End of the conference era?
Chris Adamson notes a significant contraction in iOS and related conferences recently (via Michael Tsai ).
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Impatience: The Pitfall of Every Ambitious Person
Big splashes don’t happen. Overnight success doesn’t exist. We have to remind ourselves of that whenever we show impatience.
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Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker
Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker : Effectively speaking, I've always been a Vim user. When I got my first shell account, I started with Vim (In the Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic ages of `vi`, `vim` and `neovim`, I came of age somewhere in the late Jurassic): my
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Aaron, 5 years later
I was in the back left seat of a minivan driving from New York City to Atlantic City. We were a little ways down the NJ turnpike. I was playing Zoo Keeper Battle on my newly gifted tablet. My stomach was filled with a pastrami sandwich .
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Useful Mental Models (2016)
These are some mental models I find useful. They’re rooted in decades of experience of thousands of experts – a modern equivalent of folk wisdom. Mental models are useful to quickly and correctly reason about seemingly intractable problems. They require quite a bit of intuition to properly internalize, but once you’ve…
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Beginner's guide to longevity research
A beginner's guide to longevity research
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Things I did wrong as a professor (2016)
I really screwed things up as a young faculty member at Harvard. It worked out OK in the end, but, man, I wish I could go back in time to w...
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A Love Letter to Plain Text
I have used Hugo, the blog engine this blog runs on top of, more and more lately for less and less typical use cases. Hopefully this post will inspire others in similar ways.
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Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc in 2017
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2017. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
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Why things might have taken so long
I asked why humanity took so long to do anything at the start, and the Internet gave me its thoughts. Here is my expanded list of hypotheses, summarizing from comments on the post, here, and here. …
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Dude, you broke the future
Back to: PSA: Please don't nominate the Laundry Files for a Best Series Hugo Award (this year) | Forward to: New Book Week!
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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Job Hunt
This is a story about finding a job as a senior software engineer in Toronto - with a twist: just having moved there from Germany.
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Guys, unless you are really hot you are just wasting your time on Tinder
by Worst-Online-Dater
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Good books for deep hacks
For the past few months I’ve been compiling a list of books for a deep dive into interesting technical topics. My theory is that working on projects based on these topics will be like strong individual threads I can weave into epic hacks. This list is basically a curriculum for decades of learning about the wonders of…
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First 100 miles on my E-Bike
In the last 6 months, my wife and I traveled to Europe and Asia on 2 separate occasions. I saw people riding bikes everywhere. That by itself is not surprising. What did surprise me however, was th…
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Adderall Risks: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
[Previously in series: Antidepressant Pharmacogenomics: Much More Than You Wanted To Know; SSRIs: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, etc. This is all preliminary and you should not take it as a rea…