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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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Defending my own brain against enshittification
If you haven't had Belvita breakfast cookies, you have probably had Biscoff cookies, which are similar. These are a classic airline snack. You've probably ha...
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mRNA vaccines: let's eradicate herpes, cure cancer, and be sick a whole lot less
Quick, inexpensive, made-to-order treatments
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My experiments with sprouting legumes
Recently, I have been on a ‘sprouting’ spree!! Why all this interest in sprouting suddenly? Remember my post on Moong Dal that proved sprouting reduces gas-forming and other anti-nutrients? That and the post on Iron absorption that proved sprouting makes it easier for you to assimilate Iron in your body? I mean, I…
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Dinner at a North Korean Restaurant in Shanghai (2016)
Shrouded in secrecy and isolated from the world, North Korea exudes an air of mystery. Hardly anything is known about the country except media stories about their dear leader, Kim Jong Un – h…
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You Don't Want to Think Like a Programmer
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Why do you suck at juggling now?
This is an anecodote that I often think about. It comes up for me a few times a week, whenever I feel really dumb or inept. The story is about juggling but it is really about much more than juggling.
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Profound Beliefs
This post previously appeared in EIX. In the early stages of a startup your hypotheses about all the parts of your business model are your profound beliefs. Think of profound beliefs as “strong opi…
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How to Make Visa Obey Your Every Desire: The Credit Card Concierge Experiment
The following post is a guest post by John Hargrave, whom I met in 2007 at SXSW. If you find large-scale pranks (Super Bowl, anyone?), impersonating celebrities, and other clever mischief amusing, he’s the king of the domain. His book Prank the Monkey is a guide to unleashing your inner Loki. Given my interest in […]
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What I did not learn about writing in school
Surprising lessons I picked up from the best books, essays, and videos on writing non-fiction.
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Walking the World: Bucharest
A city of the grandiose, filled with the humble
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Books and papers every graduate student should read
These recommendations are sorted from general to specific: from resources for any kind of graduate student to resources for graduate students in my own field, static analysis.
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Boswell’s Life of Johnson
James Boswell and the Nature of Genius
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Tonight we’re gonna log on like it's 1979
Teletypes may have killed a lot of forests by emitting every line to hard copy instead of a screen, but there's something to be said for t...
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Perfectionism is optimizing at the wrong scale
At the risk of stating the obvious even more obviously than I usually do: sometimes the perfect approach involves tolerating imperfection. Imperfection?! Yes. Specifically, the more macroscopic one’s view becomes, the more microscopic imperfections may need to be tolerated — if they don’t matter to the goal, or the
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Getting Started with Lockpicking
The basics: where to learn, what lock picks and practice locks to buy, where to get them, and resources, including how to find local regulations.
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Of Money, Responsibility, and Pride
Fate has made me the “money guy” for OpenSSL so I’m going to talk about that for a bit.
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Leaving Google
After seven years at Google, I'm leaving. Cue the inevitable 'what's wrong with you?' Before I get to the gripes, though, there are a few popular narratives I want to push back on: that Google has gone evil, that the good engineers are all defecting to Facebook, that 20% time was always a myth. Part one of three. The…
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Even when you do succeed, sometimes it pays to try again
If at first you don’t succeed, goes the old saying, try, try again. Good advice, up to a point. But let me offer a modification: even when you do succeed, try, try again. Tempting as it is to decla…
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I Don't Do That Job Anymore
Something has changed, permanently, in me. I’ve been trying to figure out how to express it, because the transformation has been so interesting, unexpected...
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Coding with gumption
The first and only mention of Gumption Theory in modern writing is found towards the end of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The author sets out a plain and uncomplicated approach to attaining and maintaining the state of mind required to repair a motorcycle. It takes about 20 pages. And the…
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Your body of work thinks back at you
I’ve been taking photos of benches for years. Sometimes on purpose because I find them intriguing and I have an thing for objects designed for people but without anybody using them, sometimes just because they were there next to my subject. Last year, looking at these photographs, I noticed something I didn’t know…