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14 years ago: the day Teller gave me the secret to my career in magic.
Hey gang, Lately a lot of young magicians have been asking me for advice, which has caused me to...
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 7,740 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
302
Hard-to-swallow truths they won't tell you about software engineer job
Last weekend I had a chance to talk with some students who just got their degree. They are pursuing their first software engineer job. In conversation with them, I learned that they have a pretty wrong perception of this job.
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AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog
If you’re willing to use AI-generated images, how do I know the text isn’t AI-generated?
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It's getting harder to focus every day
I’m feeling it right now. I had to set a timer for 15 minute on my computer and block all distractions to write this. If I didn’t force myself to focus I would easily get distracted by something after few minutes. Even when I’m doing things that I’ve been waiting to do it, I still feel the urge to do something else. I…
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On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
Meta-Note: I’m sorry it’s been so long between articles; for better or worse writing here is something that I do for fun, and sometimes work and family get in the way.
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How I got my laser eye injury
It has been brought to my attention that I have never actually written this story down before, merely told it in person to many students for valuable lessons and also for laughs over cocktails. It is a litany of bad ideas from several people that all came together at once to reach out and zap … Continue reading "How I…
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A Career Cold Start Algorithm
Starting a new job can be stressful so I've developed an algorithm that has helped me get up to speed quickly.
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What Dreams May Come
Join thousands of people who own a premium domain. Affordable financing available.
310
What “work” looks like
Collaboration is amazing! There’s absolutely no trade-offs, right? The mantra of sharing your work and involving everyone in decisions naturally leads to…
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How I Run a Company with ADHD
For the first 19 years of my life I was convinced I was lazy. Then I was diagnosed with ADHD. I've since started a company and grown it to a team of 8. Here's how I've learned to not just cope, but embrace the disorder.
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Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables
Speaking of being on the internet and finding things that make you go, “Hey! It’s not just me!” I scrolled across this skeet from Tyler Gaw : I just dug to the…
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An updated daily front page of The New York Times as artwork on your wall
As a news junkie, tech journalist and founder of an online news platform called Blendle, I love a good old front page of a newspaper. When…
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I got arrested in Kazakhstan and represented myself in court
When I was arrested in San Francisco, I ended up spending a night in prison naked, in solitary confinement. But, I have a dirty secret: it…
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The average college student today
How things have changed
317
Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
on starting, doing, being, and becoming.
318
Individuals Matter
One of the most common mistakes I see people make when looking at data is incorrectly using an overly simplified model. A specific variant of this that has derailed the majority of work roadmaps I've looked at is treating people as interchangeable, as if it doesn't matter who is doing what, as if individuals don't…
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Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
When people talk about the value of paying attention and slowing down, they often make it sound prudish and monk-like. But we shouldn’t forget how interesting and overpoweringly pleasurable sustained attention can be.
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Productivity porn
I have a pornography problem, but it’s not what you’re thinking. In fact, if you’re anything like me, you might too.
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How to Write with an LLM
Two rules keep an LLM from pasteurizing your writing: never take a word it suggests, and never let it encourage you. Then hand it all the tedious work.
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On Trouser Pockets
UX, ID, and Fast Fashion
327
Coffee Is Hard
Way back in the 80s, some people had a dream of combining the cutesy graphics of 80s visual games and the soul-crushing difficulty of 80s text adventures. And so Sierra On-Line created quest games.
328
Music theory for nerds
Not music nerds, obviously. I don’t know anything about music. I know there are letters but sometimes the letters have squiggles; I know an octave doubles in pitch; I know you can write a pop song with only four chords. That’s about it. The rest has always seemed completely, utterly arbitrary. Why do we have twelve…
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Avoiding homework with code and getting caught
The eventful tale of me getting fed up with my homework
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How to make a friend fast
Believe-it-or-not, we actually know exactly how to create friendships in the lab!