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Learn difficult concepts with the ADEPT method (2014)
After a decade of writing explanations, I've simplified the strategy I use to get new concepts to click. Here's how to teach yourself a difficult idea, or…
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,939 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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A response to “How to never complete anything”
The following is my response to Ewan Valentine’s blog post “How to never complete anything” that I discovered on Hacker News. Once again, I ask for people’s indulgence for posting a reply on my own blog rather than in the Hacker News comments. I find writing on my own blog a bit easier than wading […]
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Learning Feynman's Trick for Integrals
Among a few other integral tricks and techniques, Feynman's trick was a strong reason that made me love evaluating integrals, and although the technique itself goes back to Leibniz being commonly known as the Leibniz integral rule, it was Richard Feynman who popularized it, which is why it is also referred to as…
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Kezurou-Kai #39
Kezurou-kai #39 in Itoigawa, Niigata, a handplaning contest where competitors use Japanese planes to take ultra thin shavings of wood
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I’ve been single all my life
I’m single. I don’t know if this comes as a surprise to you. Of course, you have yet to hear me talking about a wife or a girlfriend. But I also rarely talk about dating and finding someone. The bigger surprise might be that I’m a lifelong single. In other words, I was never in any romantic or sexual relationship…
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A retrospective of my time on the internet
A thorough retrospective of my time on the internet.
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Why I'm Ditching Android
I've been slowly de-Googling my life, so the next step is to get rid of Android, in favour of an iPhone.
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The Tao of Programming (1987)
Note: I copied this from http://misspiggy.gsfc.nasa.gov/tao.html and stripped out all of the IMHO extraneous formatting. ---Alex
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Being Frugal Makes You A Loser
I'm all for saving money. I get as much pleasure watching my bank account grow as I do from buying things or taking trips. But, people often take frugality too far. I don't care if you're poor, and if you're reading this you're not actually poor, there are things where you should always spend a
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We’re Optimizing Ourselves to Death (2019)
Burnout is the inevitable result of our endlessly accelerating pace of life Illustration: Jutta Kuss/Getty Images Author’s Note: I’ve recently partnered with Project DigInThere, an onli…
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Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email
In November 2017, I deactivated my account on Facebook. I didn’t leave Facebook for moral reasons back then but more because it was starting to feel like a waste of time and valuable brain cy…
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Daring Fireball: The Kids Are All Right
Somehow I don’t think young Mr. Kaplan — a 13-year-old with an iPad app — sees the iPad as hurting his sense of wonder or entrepreneurism.
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Study helps explain why motivation to learn declines with age
MIT neuroscientists have identified a brain circuit critical for learning to make decisions that require evaluating the cost or reward of an action. They showed this circuit is negatively affected by aging and in Huntington’s disease.
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Care
My tech posts often come from kind of a negative place. I wish it wasn't like that, but we all know how the mind works: writing with nuance and positivity is a lot harder than fired-up screeds of the "someone is wrong on the Internet" variety.
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Life Is Driven by Network Effects
Revealing the Unseen Forces That Guide Your Life What city you live in. Who you date or marry. Which job you choose. What clothes you wear. We all think we make these choices ourselves. It certainly feels like we’re in full control. But it turns out that our choices — both in our startups and in … Continue reading…
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The Insanity of Being a Software Engineer
Is something I think about often because I can’t help but wonder if most other jobs are like this.
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Code is clay now
Artisans, factories and the new material software is made of
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The Intellectual Obesity Crisis (2022)
Information addiction is rotting our brains
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Stealing Is a Skill
I’m slowly developing my own list of advice: have a creative mindset, embrace radical transparency, and write down what makes you happy. I’d like to add one more to the list: stealing is a skill!
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You Are Not Late
[Translations: Italian, Japanese, Chinese] Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 1985 when almost any dot com name you wanted was available? All words; short ones, cool ones. All you had to do was … Continue reading →
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I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore
Disability, shame, and the hidden violence of a culture that equates productivity with value