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Start Something Small
The other day I was listening to Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and and I found it amazing how this book, which has now sold over 15 million copies, originally started:
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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,743 posts.
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Learning Online
That we’ll learn school-ish things on the internet seems inevitable, but most people seem not to learn very much or very quickly online; Sebastian Thrun admitted as much in a Fast Company interview a few months ago. To figure out how computers actually could help people learn, I spent the summer teaching students and…
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10 Years of Pomological Watercolors
A decade ago today I published a blog post calling for the US government to release its paintings of fruits. The Pomological Watercolor Collection, as I had recently come to know, is a beautiful and remarkable corpus of over 7,000 pictures of fruits and other biological specimens, made between the 1880s and 1940s…
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Kaggle Learn review: there is a deep learning track and it is worth your time
Right from my undergrad days when I was starting out with machine learning to this date, my admiration for Kaggle continues to grow. In addition to being synonymous with and popularizing data scien…
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How I Left YouTube
What was the road like when I left?
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Leo Tolstoy on why people drink (2014)
“The seeing, spiritual being, whose manifestation we commonly call conscience, always points with one end towards right and with the other towards wrong, and we do not notice it while we foll…
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Quit Social Media (2016)
Anti-Social Grumblings I recently gave a deliberatively provocative TEDx talk titled “quit social media” (see the video above). The theme of the event was “visions ... Read more
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Is "colorectal cancer" rising in "young people"?
(Yes, but.)
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Don't use your phone while you poop
Your brain needs to offload just as badly as your butt does. I know it sounds boring to sit in there, alone, naked from the waist down, staring at the wal...
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Computer work lying down comfortably with a home-made stand over the bed
This article reports the result of a successful personal attempt to find an arrangement of keyboard, mouse and monitor for lying down comfortably while using a computer. It describes the arrangement and reports experiences using it. It does not discuss general motivations for working lying down.
3251
Plagiarized in a plagiarism atonement essay
News broke this morning that upcoming author Jumi Bello plagiarized from Plagiarism Today when drafting a plagiarism explainer essay.
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LLM Daydreaming
Proposal & discussion of how default mode networks for LLMs are an example of missing capabilities for search and novelty in contemporary AI systems.
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Create optimal conditions for lucky things to happen to you (2020)
Your entire worldview changes when you realize you can create luck.
3258
C.I.A. Lacing (2014)
Tutorial for C.I.A. Lacing shoes, in which straight segments are interpersed with one or more visible crossovers at different positions as a form of covert signalling.
3259
One of the Best Bits of Programming Advice I ever Got
Years ago (early 1992), I attached myself to this crazy skunkworks project that was using this weird language called Smalltalk. "Object Orie...
3260
Bruce Lee and Me
A reflection on the 50th anniversary of my friend's death.
3261
Do I need to go to university?
Instead of asking “Is university good?”, ask “Do I have something more compelling to do?”. Instead of “Should I do a PhD?”, ask “Where can I find the best environment to grow as a researcher?”.
3262
Teach your kids poker, not chess
Why poker may be more instructive as a game than chess
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Comparing the power consumption of a 30 year old refrigerator to a new one
Having a home server and a few smart plugs leads to interesting data points like this one. Well, interesting to me, at least.
3264
Advice
Every now and again, someone emails me and asks for very general advice. ("How do I change the world?") With the caveat that I've only lived a fraction of one life, and am still trying to figure things out, here's the advice I'd give past me.
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Who Uses To-Do Lists?
Successful people who use to-do lists and the boring takeaway.
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I can't use my number pad for 2FA codes
This has to be the most infuriating bug report I've ever submitted. I went to type in my 2FA code on a website - but no numbers appeared on screen. Obviously, I was an idiot and had forgotten to press the NumLock button. D'oh! I toggled it on and typed again. No numbers appeared. I switched to another tab, my numbers…
3270
Scissor Statements: Sort by Controversial
[Epistemic status: fiction] Thanks for letting me put my story on your blog. Mainstream media is crap and no one would have believed me anyway. This starts in September 2017. I was working for a sm…