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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,944 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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My favorite fable
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.
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This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio)
David Foster Wallace's remarkable 2005 commencement speech, This is Water, is a timeless trove of wisdom for living a meaningful life. Here is a full transcript along with audio.
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A retrospective of the fructose alarmism debate.
After 300 comments and counting, it’s safe to agree with Nigel Kinbrum that my recent critique of Dr. Robert Lustig’s fructose lecture “has caused a bit of a stir in the nutritional blogosphere.” The intense debate (& discussion) that ensued inspired me to re-cap some things I feel were most interesting. There was…
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Blue light has a dark side
Light at night is bad for your health, and exposure to blue light emitted by electronics and energy-efficient lightbulbs may be especially so....
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From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs. of Muscle in 4 Weeks
After holding off for nearly two years, I’m posting this because too many people have asked for it. The lasses should read it, too, as the same principles can be applied to bodyfat loss. I weighed 152 lbs. for four years of high school, and after training in tango in Buenos Aires in 2005, that […]
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Psychology of Human Misjudgment (Transcript) by Charlie Munger
In The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, Charlie Munger explains why we behave the way we do. This is a transcript of the fully updated talk.
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Reverse Voxsplaining: Drugs vs. Chairs
[Content note: this is pretty much a rehash of things I’ve said before, and that other people have addressed much more eloquently. My only excuse for wasting your time with it again is that S…
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Language Log » Orwell's Liar
January 10, 2009 @ 1:19 am · Filed by David Beaver under Peeving , Prescriptivist poppycock
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Why Procrastinators Procrastinate
The full story about why procrastinators routinely ruin their own lives.
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Watts Backlist
A part of new Peter Watts' novel.
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The Archive (macOS) – Note Taking: Nimble, Calm, Plain.txt • Zettelkasten Method
Calm, simple, and beautiful macOS note-taking app for creative thinking.
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Clean Coder Blog
Peter was showing the relationship between age and reputation on stack overflow. The correlation is unmistakable. The older the programmer, the better the reputation, by far. He also shows, in the following graph, that the reason for this correlation is that the older programmers answer far more questions than the…
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Accelerando - Charlie's Diary
This free ebook edition is made available by kind consent of my publishers, Ace and Orbit, under a Creative Commons license with certain restrictions attached. In particular, you may not create derivative works or use the work for commercial gain .
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Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge
This article will help you overcome one of the greatest difficulties you will face when trying to accelerate learning: formulating knowledge.
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The Simple Truth
“I remember this paper I wrote on existentialism. My teacher gave it back with an F. She’d underlined true and truth wherever it appeared in the essay, probably about twenty times, with a question mark beside each. She wanted to know what I meant by truth.”
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Book Review: Albion’s Seed
I. Albion’s Seed by David Fischer is a history professor’s nine-hundred-page treatise on patterns of early immigration to the Eastern United States. It’s not light reading and not…
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MIT Challenge
In 2012, I decided to try to learn MIT's 4-year undergraduate computer science curriculum in 12 months, without taking any classes. I was successful in passing the final exams for 33 classes and completing the required programming projects. You can view my TEDx Talk regarding the challenge, see links to all the free…
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Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
April 2005 This summer, as an experiment, some friends and I are giving seed funding to a bunch of new startups. It's an experiment because we're prepared to fund younger founders than most investors would. That's why we're doing it during the summer—so even college students can participate. We know from Google and…
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The Power of the Marginal
June 2006 (This essay is derived from talks at Usenix 2006 and Railsconf 2006.) A couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple garage. As we stood there, he said that as a kid growing up in Saskatchewan he'd been amazed at the dedication Jobs and Wozniak must have had to work in a garage. "Those…
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Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success
[Previously in sequence: Epistemic Learned Helplessness] I. “Culture is the secret of humanity’s success” sounds like the most vapid possible thesis. The Secret Of Our Success by …
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Jef Raskin on "Intuitive Interfaces"
One of the most common terms of praise for an interface is to say that it is "intuitive" (the word should have been "intuitable" but we will bow to convention). Yet the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) literature rarely mentions the word, and for good reason. This note attempts to clarify the meaning of "intuitive"…
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Rees Re: OO
(Jonathan Rees had a really interesting response to Why Arc isn't Especially Object-Oriented , which he has allowed me to reproduce here.) Here is an a la carte menu of features or properties that are related to these terms; I have heard OO defined to be many different subsets of this list.
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Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person
“Universal love,” said the cactus person. “Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat. “Right,” I said. “I’m absolutely in favor of both those things.…
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The Carbohydrate Hypothesis of Obesity: a Critical Examination
Introduction I'd like to begin by emphasizing that carbohydrate restriction has helped many people lose body fat and improve their metabol...
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A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking
My book, Sous Vide for the Home Cook , came out in 2010. You can order the second edition directly from the US publisher. My book has over 200 delicious recipes for beef, pork, lamb, game, chicken, turkey, duck, fish, shellfish, vegetables, fruits, legumes, ice cream bases, sauces, and yogurt. I first cover the basics…