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Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say
The Dimensionality Problem
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,940 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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Learning math? Think like a cartoonist
What's the essential skill of a cartoonist? Drawing ability? Humor? A deep well of childhood trauma? I'd say it's an eye for simplification, capturing the…
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Math as a habit
Making math a daily habit
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“The Famous F40” Vector Illustration
I was looking through some old Macintosh CD-ROMs, searching for my usual things that I do whenever I add new discs to my collection: hanafuda, specific artis...
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How to Begin a Novel
Last year for National Novel Writing Month I trained a neural net called torch-rnn on 10,096 unique ways to begin a novel. It came up with some intriguing possibilities, my personal favorite being “I am forced to write to my neighbors about the beast.” But many of its sentences used made-up words, or had such weird…
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Terry Pratchett's Study
This is not a replica of Terry Pratchett’s study. To do that, I would have needed pictures from every angle and exact measurements, so this is just a small part of a study, where Terry Pratchett might have felt at home, in scale 1:12. If you read “The Borrowers" as…
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Mental Model: Difficult Problems vs. Hard Work
How to model work that interacts with ambiguity
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The Soul of a Pedicab Driver
The Soul of a Pedicab Driver, by Carl Etnier.
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Don’t prematurely obsess on a single “big problem” or “big theory”
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. (Susan Ertz, “Anger in the Sky”) There is a particularly dangerous occupational haz…
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So Far, So Good
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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Creativity is a great motivator
After a few years teaching a beginners course, I realized that using creativity is a great motivator to learn programming. Even in a technical field like software engineering, even with logic-driven students, the desire to create and express oneself is stimulating and inspiring.
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Relearning to Learn
Many years ago, I took a test. It was the first step of our “Learning to Learn” class. After answering a series of multiple choice question, the form issued forth a proclomation:
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Bruce Lee’s Letters to Himself About Authenticity, Personal Development
“Where some people have a self, most people have a void, because they are too busy in wasting their vital creative energy… actualizing a concept of what they should be like rather than …
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Being fat is a trap
This has been a difficult article to write. Partly because this is a painful topic for many, and partly because I have to be completely open and vulnerable to write about it. I only write this in the hope it can help others in similar situations. Nothing in this article is meant to judge you. If someone judges you for…
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The USB Situation
I write this from the latest MacBook Pro. I've been running this as my primary machine for almost a month. When I'm not grinding out the latest soon-to-be-relea
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We don’t trade with ants
When discussing advanced AI, sometimes the following exchanges happens: “Perhaps advanced AI won’t kill us. Perhaps it will trade with us” “We don’t trade with ants” I think it’s interesting to get clear on exactly why we don’t trade with ants, and whether it is relevant to the AI situation. When a person says “we…
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Talent Is Largely a Myth
One of the repeating motifs of recruiting in the software industry are mantras of “talent”: “We recruit the best talent”, “talent attracts talent”, “we value talent” and so on. Some companies have so called “head of talent”, “talent acquisition”, “talent development” professionals on their payroll - basically a…
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World Cup Daily, Day 25
They just don't care. Qatari World Cup organizers don't even hide their apathy over migrant worker deaths, including the most recent one.
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Interslavic Language
Introduction to Interslavic — Vvod v medžuslovjansky jeazy — Ввод в меджусловјански језык
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Life is fractal, but markets are square
I recently read Venkat’s synopsis of the book Seeing like a state, which I followed up by an excellent blog post titled The Meridian of Her Greatness. Venkat challenged people to summarize the most important ideas from that post in a tweetstorm. He said if it gets more than 100 likes, on Twitter he’ll give… Read More
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Stop generating, start thinking
Instead of wanting to learn and improve as humans, and build better software, we’ve outsourced our mistakes to an unthinking algorithm.
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Monetizing hobbies
I don’t know if this is a new trend or if I’m just noticing it now, but more and more the popular wisdom seems to be that you shouldn’t monetize your hobby. That if you do, it turns it into a job, a hustle1; that it sucks all the fun out of it. Putting aside for now the fact that some people might want to turn their…