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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 276 posts.
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What you wanted to know about AI
Recently a number of famous people, including Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, warned everybody about the dangers of machine intelligence. …
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Life Lessons from Machine Learning
What comes to mind when you hear the term “Machine Learning”? A bunch of programmers hunched over their computers in a dark room, working on something completely virtual & divorced from reality…
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Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book
Update : I really can't say as much as I would like (there's stuff I can't share), but my publisher had a face-to-face with an Amazon rep and internal action was taken. Amazon's investigation is apparently over. The internal position seems to be "we're making money, there are words on pages, so there's no problem…
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Paul Kalanithi, writer and neurosurgeon, dies at 37
Paul Kalanithi wrote essays for The New York Times and Stanford Medicine reflecting on being a physician and a patient, the human experience of facing death, and the joy he found despite terminal illness.
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Notes on 416 Days of Treadmill Desk Usage
The personal website of author Neal Stephenson, unless it's been hacked.
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Seneca on the proper use of time
Yesterday I wrote about the impending death of the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks. I was particularly struck by this line from Sachs’ public goodbye
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Stephen King's “Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully”
"I really am going to tell you everything you need to pursue a successful and financially rewarding career writing fiction, and I really am going to do it in ten minutes, which is exactly how long it took me to learn."
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Microwave Oven Diagnostics with Indian Snack Food
Microwave ovens are curious beasts. A super convenient method of warming up certain foods, for boiling a cup of water, melting a little butter, or reheating frozen leftovers. But all too often, those frozen leftovers end up scorching in places and rock-hard frozen in others. Is this just random? Is it really the case…
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“Citizenfour” Awarded Oscar for Best Documentary in 2014
CITIZENFOUR, Laura Poitras' riveting documentary about Edward Snowden's efforts to shed light on gross surveillance abuses by the United States government and its partners, just won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Tonight's Oscar win recognizes not only the incredible...
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Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average
This is a story about McGill education students that cannot calculate an average, and the professor who admitted he didn't care. Fina...
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The Expert in a Year Challenge
The Expert in a Year Challenge took place in 2014 and followed novice table tennis player Sam Priestley's journey from complete beginner to mastery.
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Memrefuting
(in which I bring this blog back to the “safe, uncontroversial” territory of arguing with people who think they can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time) A few people have aske…
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Programmer proverbs
To be a programmer is to learn relentlessly. A short and deep collection of advices.
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The Apprentice Programmer (2013)
I dropped out of school when I was 16 years old. School was not for me. To me, computers were so much more interesting. Right or wrong, I felt like I wasted my time there and my real education was starting when I came home. I lost respect for the institution and of course this meant that I no longer bothered to put any
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A Tale of Two Zippers
Recently, Akiba took me to visit his friend’s zipper factory. I love visiting factories: no matter how simple the product, I learn something new.
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