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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,940 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge
This article will help you overcome one of the greatest difficulties you will face when trying to accelerate learning: formulating knowledge.
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Low-quality sleep can lead to procrastination
New research that was recently published in Frontiers in Psychology provides important insights regarding the connection between sleep quality and the tendency to procrastinate .
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Open-plan office is the worst. Why can't we kill it?
The open-plan office fad took off as a dream for a more collaborative and egalitarian workplace. Tear down those walls! Ditch the soul-crushing...
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Name It, and They Will Come
A change starts with a story.
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Nobody wants to read your shit (2009)
My first real job was in advertising. I worked as a copywriter for an agency called Benton & Bowles in New York City. An artist or entrepreneur's first job inevitably bends the twig. It shapes who you'll become. If your freshman outing is in journalism, your brain gets tattooed (in a good way) with…
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My New Favorite Tool for Reviewing PDFs: Okular
Harris Kenny, founder of OutboundSync. A little ode to a computing journey.
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Hexagonal Cross Stitch
At least year’s Bridges Conference in Stockholm, I attended a short presentation by Susan Goldstine about “self-diagramming lace” . As motivation for the new work she was presenting, Susan referenced her paper from the year before on what she calls “symmetry samplers” . Samplers are an old tradition in fibre arts. A…
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Tickling (2018)
Before our kids learned to talk, I would play tickles with them. I would make tickling gestures as I moved towards them, they would start giggling a little, then I would tickle them and they would laugh. We'd continue until they seemed to be done with the game, and then we'd move on to something else. As they got…
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So Long, MSDN Blog
UPDATE 4: My original MSDN blog content, minus the comments, has been archived publicly on the MSDN site; thanks again to Scott and Dan and everyone else who made this happen. Why minus the comment…
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The principle of charity: Criticize the best interpretation of an argument
The principle of charity is a philosophical principle that denotes that, when interpreting someone’s statement, you should assume that the best possible interpretation of that statement is the one that the speaker meant to convey. Accordingly, to implement the principle of charity, you should not attribute falsehoods…
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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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What the Hell Is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance
David shares how the new age of information abundance is transforming commerce, education, and politics. Read here.
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Thinkpad X210
A couple years ago, I used an old Thinkpad while my MacBook was being repaired. I enjoyed the experience so much that I ended up getting a Thinkpad X62 (an X61 chassis with modern internals). Last S…
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iPad Pro as Development Machine
I purchased an iPad Pro with the Smart Keyboard and Pencil to use as my main computer. Can it replace my local workstation? Is it powerful enough for my day-to-day tasks? Let's find out.
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Programming Sucks
E very friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro, 1 [1] you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.”
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Gwern’s AI-Generated Poetry
Gwern has answered my prayers and taught GPT-2 poetry. GPT-2 is the language processing system that OpenAI announced a few weeks ago. They are keeping the full version secret, but have released a s…
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Getting too absorbed in side projects
Does anyone else get too absorbed in side projects that you forget about life
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Lessons learned: writing really long fiction
So, about a decade ago I wrote an essay on this blog about the writing of the Merchant Princes series (at that point, six slim novels—the Empire Games follow-on trilogy wasn't more than a daydream back then), in which I tried to pin down what I'd learned about writing a series.
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Graying Out
For many years I’ve interacted with my fellow humans, I think perhaps more than any other way, via the medium of Internet chat. But in my chat window, they’re fading, one by one. This problem is technical and personal and I felt it ought not to go unrecognized.
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On the death of my family's dairy farm
This Christmas, like every other, I traveled to northern Wisconsin to stay with my parents on the dairy farm I grew up on.
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Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist
The story of an unusual career transition.
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Daydreaming about the future instead of doing work today
I have a friend who’s creating an awesome side project: LED signs that you can control to let your coworkers know you’re busy.…