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Mastering Nim, 2nd edition
Discover the secret of Nim!
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,943 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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Five Most Productive Years: What Happened and What's Next
On his 65th birthday, Stephen Wolfram details how his 'now or never' thinking has made the last five years some of his most productive. Read about his projects in tech and science.
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What’s the origin of the phrase “big data doesn’t fit in excel”?
Welcome to Yak Shaving School! As part of my MSc I'm reading a book about Data Analytics. So I've been chasing down quotes to find their origin. One paper had this popular quote in it (emphasis added): As with many rapidly emerging concepts, Big Data has been variously defined and operationalized, ranging from trite…
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A review of Dominion, 4000 plays later (2012)
This was an entry for the Voice of Experience review contest, which aims to compile reviews written by those that are experienced with the games they review. Like reading a novel, playing a board g…
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Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies
Let structure emerge organically. When it’s imposed from the start, you prematurely constrain what may emerge and artificially compress the nuanced relationships between ideas.
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1,000 (bad) ideas
Tidying up my messy corner in the basement I unearthed one of my older "ideas books" in which I write down the random ideas that flit throug...
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The Biggest Mistake I Ever Made
There was a time in my life when I played quite a bit of basketball. I was leading engineering at a start-up in Scottsdale, AZ, my wife was…
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Book Review: Double Fold
Finalist #6 of the book review contest
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Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
Gamification works too well on me. I'll do anything for a high score, to complete a progress bar, or to unlock an achievement.
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Now is the best time to write code by hand
As more engineers use the irresistible LLMs their skills atrophy, practicing will make you special.
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Better drainage of brain debris improves Alzheimer's disease therapies
In most of the organs of our body, the lymphatic system is responsible for conducting lymph between different parts of the body. The lymphatic system processes an average of 3 liters of lymph per day. Lymph lies between the blood vessels and the cells. The lymphatic system provides a return route to the blood vessels…
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On Writing More
I know we don’t like Louis C.K.
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How to write a novel using the snowflake method (2013)
How to write a novel: Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson teaches his wildly popular Snowflake Method for designing and writing a novel.
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Finding the Air Cannon
◄ Newer Article ◄ Newer Story Home ⌂ Older Article ► Older Story ► ...
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Quality and Effort (2018)
It seems as though the opposite of “careless” ought to be “careful.” That the best way to avoid avoidable errors is to try harder, to put more care into the work. This means…
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What Math Do You Need for Physics?
Chad Orzel has a very sensible piece at Forbes, headlined What Math Do You Need For Physics? It Depends, which addresses the question of what math a physicist like him (experimental AMO physics) re…
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Email: the easiest way to improve retention
Build amazing customer experiences on the Twilio platform with APIs for SMS, RCS, voice, and email, plus conversational AI for smarter engagement, and identity verification for trust.
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The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance
Epistemic spot checks typically consist of references from a book, selected by my interest level, checked against either the book’s source or my own research. This one is a little different t…
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The Trap You Set For Yourself
The Dan Ariely books, Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, profoundly influenced the way I design my massively multiplayer typing games. These books offer science in the small about human behavior, and stark insights into user behavior – and by that I mean our own behavior. All detectives are by
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Learning from failure to tackle hard problems
This blog post is based on the work BaNEL: Exploration Posteriors for Generative Modeling Using Only Negative Rewards. Tackling Very Hard Problems The ultimate aim of machine learning research is to push machines beyond human limits in critical applications, including the next generation of th
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How to read an RFC
For better or worse, Requests for Comments (RFCs) are how we specify many protocols on the Internet. These documents are alternatively treated as holy texts by developers who parse them for hidden meanings, then shunned as irrelevant because they can’t be understood. This often leads to frustration and – more…
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Beautiful stop-motion engine rebuild [video]
Chris Herridge spent eleven months painstakingly rebuilding the engine of his Triumph Spitfire Mk3 , and photographing the process. Over 3,000 photos later, and he created this amazing video of an engine being disassembled and rebuilt.
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