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A Survival Guide to a PhD
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,941 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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When you change the world and no one notices
Do you know what’s happening in this picture? Literally one of the most important events in human history.
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I lost my OpenBSD full-disk encryption password
The other day I set up a new OpenBSD instance with a nice RAID array, encrypted with Full Disk Encryption. And promptly proceeded to forget part of the passphrase.
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The Math Myth
Math professor David Edwards sent me this short essay on mathematical education. Printed with his permission. The Math Myth Themath myth is the myth that the future of the American economy is dependent upon the masses having higher mathematics skills. This myth goes back to at least Sputnik, when the Russians were…
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Reality is a Shared Hallucination (1997)
The artificial construction of reality was to play a key role in the new form of global intelligence which would soon emerge among human beings. If the group brain's "psyche" were a beach with shifting dunes and hollows, individual perception would be that beach's grains of sand. However this image has a hidden snag …
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How and why I made a zine
How (and why) I made a zine
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Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)
Discover what Hunter S. Thompson's letter on finding your purpose, revisited today, teaches about choosing a way of life over chasing any fixed goal.
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Why should children program? A review of Seymour Papert's Mindstorms
This is an essay about what it means to teach a kid to program, using Seymor Paperts groundbreaking book Mindstorms as a reference.
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Bicycling: The Safest Form of Transportation
Of all the objections I get from people about why they can’t ride a bike to get around, perhaps the most frustrating is the claim that bicycling is too dangerous. According to this line of re…
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Why People Should Learn Python
Join Illya Gerasymchuk on his new blog as he explores blockchain, DeFi, Zero-Knowledge cryptography, AI, and finance.
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Don't Read the Comments
I sent this email to the current YC batch this morning: I've talked to some of you who are really bummed about negative press coverage or online comments about your company. Often this takes...
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Fighting Cancer
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
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Sad Trombone Exoplanet Reality Check
Some people on the internet are getting very excited at the (unconfirmed) reports of an "Earth-like" exoplanet orbiting Proxima Centauri , a mere 4.25 light-years away from Earth. If correct, the planet is orbiting in the liquid water zone around our nearest stellar neighbour and is of the same order of mass as the…
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Japanese writing system basics
Explains how the Japanese writing system works by comparing it to expanding the English alphabet.
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Less stress, more productivity: working fewer hours is good for you and your boss
There’s always too much work to be done on software projects, too many features to implement, too many bugs to fix. Some days you’re just not going through the backlog fast enough, you’re not producing enough code, and it’s taking too long to fix a seemingly-impossible bug. And to make things worse you’re wasting time…
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On Cybersecurity and Being Targeted
Last month, I was the subject of a targeted cyber attack. Someone went through substantial lengths to attempt to gain access to my GitHub account, but were...
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Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail
In 2013, when it became clear, primarily through Edward Snowden’s heroic actions, that the level of snooping by the US and other governments was far greater than any of us would have thought, I moved all of my data out of the US and of course blogged about it (that blog post has been read almost 70000 times; I think…
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Find a new city
There’s a very rom antic American story that I love, that lots of a rtists who are young and starting out love, too, and it goes like this: Move to the Big City with nothing, make friends, make art, struggle, but make it. That’s the kind of story told in Patti Smith’s wonderful memoir, Just Kids .
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How to listen when you disagree
Urban Confessional: A Free Listening Movement have been Free Listening on street corners for almost a decade. How to Listen When You Disagree is a reflection on listening from the 2016 RNC, and it is more relevant today than ever before.
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Why lack of confidence can make you a better programmer
What if you’re not a superstar programmer? What if other people work longer than you, or harder than you, or have built better projects than you? Can you succeed without self-confidence? I believe you can, and moreover I feel that lack of confidence can actually make you a better programmer.