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Cross the world four times
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 7,746 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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I made a quieter air purifier
The physics of sound, and the PC fan CR box v1.
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The Worst (2012)
I don’t really know who Dustin Curtis is, but he blogs a lot, and those blog entries often end up onHacker News. Not too long ago, he wrote a blog post titled “The Best,” in which he explains that he has nice stuff. That in fact, everything he owns is actually the very best of its kind.Dustin’s...
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When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995
In my last post, I reminisced about my bbs software that I wrote and sold in 1993. In 1995, I was a senior in high school, and my school had just purchased a 76 computer Novell network for the 900 ...
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Why Entrepreneurs Can't Sleep
For those of you that know me well, you know that I have terrible, horrible insomnia. In high school, I would go to sleep around 3am and then struggle to get up at 6:30 am. I would drink a dozen Mountain Dews everyday just to stay awake. In college, my schedule shifted further so that I was falling asleep around 6am…
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Dear Google, am I pregnant?
Here in the UK, we are a signatory to the European Convention of Human Rights, which among other things includes an explicit right to privacy (considerably stronger than the implicit privacy rights acknowledged in the US, which are not enumerated directly by the US constitution).
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Novellas with Groff
Don't even think about it: I won't publish this. Nor send it to you privately, which is mostly the same as publishing it.
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Changing Directions
<p>I have two important announcements:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I’m leaving the tech industry. Hopefully “for good”; if not, at least “for now”.</p> </li> <li> <p>As such, the content on this blog is going to shift, perhaps dramatically. I’m going to be writing about a broader range of…
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The Unhealthy Desire for Prestige
There is an unhealthy desire for prestige and money that is ruining people's lives. At the end of all the striving, you might end up feeling empty inside. The desire for prestige and money is why we: 1) spend an outrageous sum of money on education despite it being free, 2) kill ourselves at jobs we
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Button Pushes You (2022)
From reconfiguring the system to reconfiguring the user.
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The B Lane Swimmer (2009)
A number of years ago, I joined a Master’s swim team. I was doing triathlons at the time, and the swim was my weakest leg. The team I joined divided the pool into four lanes: A (fastest swimmers), B (next fastest), C (next fastest) and D (slowest.) Workouts were organized accordingly; faster swimmers were assigned…
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So you want to write a technical book
If you’re knowledgeable in a technical field, writing a book to teach others a few things can be a rewarding experience on many different levels. With the many avenues available for self-publishing these days, an important question to ask yourself is “Do I need a publisher?”. The answer depends on your particular…
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Know Your Carrying Capacity
Mac's Tech Blog
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A Light Box in Heavy Times
My son is nearing his second birthday, which makes him nearly two years old. When he was only four months old I decided that I would make him something with buttons. I didn’t have much more of an idea than that, but I ordered one hundred illuminated buttons and started mulling what to do with them. Nothing much…
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Princess Pricklepants, Startup Founder Extraordinaire
Previously: Princess Pricklepants, Entrepreneur Dear reader, for our preamble we’d like to say a number of fascinating, witty, clever, and delightful things, but we can’t think of any. …
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The best things and stuff of 2011 by Fogus
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2011. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
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Greenland Sharks
Greenland shark swimming under an ice flow in the Canadian arctic WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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Tilton
In 2000, the programmatic browser differences were perplexing, so I made a tool to help manage the problem. I started with something similar to ecomcon (see How JavaScript Works , Chapter 23). I would have special markers in the source that designated sections of code that would only be delivered to particular…
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I’m Leaving IBM
Today is my last day at IBM. If you’ve been following along, IBM bought my startup Resilient Systems in Spring 2016. Since then, I have been with IBM, holding the nicely ambiguous title of “Special Advisor.” As of the end of the month, I will be back on my own. I will continue to write and speak, and do the occasional…
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How to Think Real Good (2013)
Practical epistemology: heuristics for how to think about difficult things, particularly using formal methods.
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Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
Utopian energy is an imagined form of energy that’s abundant, reliable, inexpensive, and also clean, renewable, and life-sustaining. But utopian energy is as much a fantasy as a utopian society. Seeking the fount of perfect energy allows us to pretend there aren’t real-world tradeoffs between, say,
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What’s the Difference Between American English and British English?
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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I’ve made a conscious effort to stop apologizing for bugs in my code
Look out, honey, ’cause I’m using technologyAin’t got time to make no apologyThe Stooges, “Search and Destroy” For the last year or so, I’ve made a conscious eff…
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Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should
I investigated the various standards available for storing and presenting recipes on the web
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I Remain a Skeptic
I still do not use LLMs for anything I actually care about. There are a lot of reasons I could give: environmental, social, political. I could talk about ecosystem lock-in, learned dependence, self-soverignty, philosophical concerns, the intentional dismantling of labour bargaining power, and more. But before all of…