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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 7,746 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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Easy Ways to Fail a Ph.D.
I'm supervising a lot of new grad students this semester, so for their sake, I'm cataloging the common reasons for failure.
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Satoshi Kon's last words
Satoshi Kon, the director of anime movies Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, Millenium Actress and Paprika, as well as the TV series Paranoia Agent, died on Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 at the age of 46. ( NY Times obituary .) He left behind a rambling but extraordinary document , which his family has posthumously posted…
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Programming will never be "easy".
There seems to be this idea going around the internet that the reason someone isn’t able to program, is because languages aren’t good enough yet. A couple of people I have seen with hav…
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How Authors Really Make Money: The Rebirth of Seth Godin
What do the economics of publishing look like… really? (Photo: thinkpanama) (Special thanks to my agent, Steve Hanselman, and my anonymous sources within the world’s biggest publishing houses) Print is dead! This has become a popular headline, and a great way to get quoted, as Nicholas Negroponte has shown. Iconic…
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Homeless Experiment
On Thursday June 4 th of 2009 I left the comforts of my home in Austin, TX. with no food, no money and no place to stay for 5 days and 4 nights. I did this voluntarily as a small experiment to see what it was like to live on the streets of Austin, TX.
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Teach Like You're the Student
“I never have let my schooling interfere with my education.” – Mark Twain Every time I see my graduate students try to teach for the first time, it’s usually so painful I bite my lip. Then I …
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How to Take a Walk
It was cool and mildly breezy around 8 PM today. So I went for a walk, and I noticed something. Though I passed a couple of hundred people, nobody else was…
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Beyond the 10,000 Hour Rule: Richard Hamming and the Messy Art of Becoming Great
What Makes Great Scientists Great? In March of 1986, an overflow audience of over 200 researchers and staff members from Bell Laboratories piled into the ... Read more
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The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.
There's a bit more below, but I also wrote a follow-up 5 years after the illustrated guide which may be of interest -- HOWTO: Get tenure .
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The Startup Diet: How I Lost 35 Pounds While Working Overtime
I recently decided to change the way I was taking care of my body. It should be no surprise that I am always on my computer – at least 12-15 hours per day. I am 5' 9" but used to weigh an undesirable 170-175 pounds. Most of this was brought on during my first years of college. I entered college as a