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Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 1,197 posts.

Any year
691

This I Believe (1952)

I am not going to talk about religious beliefs but about matters so obvious that it has gone out of style to mention them. I believe in my neighbors. I know their faults, and I know that their virtues far outweigh their faults.

693

It’s not the chemicals that cause addiction (2017)

Drugs cause addiction*. It is a rhetoric deeply ingrained into the American psyche based on a series of rat experimentations that placed one rat alone in a cage with two water bottles--one containing cocaine or heroin, the other just water. The rat chose the cocaine- or heroin-laced water every time until it died. The…

696

How an Illinois rest stop inspired a web page

Last summer I was driving back to Chicago from Wisconsin. On the Illinois side there are a couple of rest stops over the tollway. It’s a great place to get some gas, grab some caffeine, and stretch your legs a little before the final 50 miles home. The rest stop usually has a booth where y…

698

No Paper Is That Good

Last year, Noah Smith proposed his Two Paper Rule: If you want me to read the vast literature, cite me two papers that are exemplars and paragons of that literature. Foundational papers, key recent innovations – whatever you like (but no review papers or summaries). Just two. I will read them. If these two papers […]

700

Infinite work is less work

The first task of last week's Weekly Challenge was to print the first ten strong and weak primes. A prime p n is "strong" if it's larger than the average of its two neighbouring primes ( i.e. p n > (p n-1 +p n+1 )/2 ). A prime is "weak" if it's smaller than the average of its two neighbours.

704

Wooden bikes

WOODEN BIKES Do they break easily?Can they withstand rain?Can they be compared to regular bikes? – Questions similar to these are completely logical and expected since wooden bikes aren't too common. We have had the same questions and concerns ourselves and have tried our best to answer them. Not so long ago we even

715

How to overcome resistance to work

Even if your approach to work is excellent and you are self-disciplined, from time to time, a nasty task will appear. Task that you will feel extreme resistance to, which will cause you to procrastinate. However, with the right approach, you can get cr...