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Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 602 posts.
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Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits
A friend recently asked how to get started watching Gundam, and as I tripped all over myself, equal parts excitement and not wanting to sound like a
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2k-year-old wine and the uncanny immediacy of the past
Why artifacts like the Carmona Wine Urn, the Pazyryk Rug, and the Sword of Goujian are so important
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Isolating complexity is the essence of successful abstractions
Complexity has to live somewhere; but it does not have to live everywhere.
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Eating stinging nettles
Spring is here and the nettles are growing again so I decided it was time to make a meal out of them. Most people know that stinging nettles are pesky green plants that irritate the skin when you t…
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Page is under construction: A love letter to the personal website
If you take just one thing away from this article, I want it to be this: please build your own website.
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Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in words of four letters or less (1999)
So, have a seat. Put your feet up. This may take some time. Can I get you some tea? Earl Grey? You got it.
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If my kids excel, will they move away?
I grew up on a farm outside of a rural town about an hour southeast of Columbus, Ohio. Like many small towns in America, my town knows “brain drain” – all of my friends from high school who went to college (~30% of my class) now live elsewhere, although most are pretty close by (e.g., several live in the suburbs of…
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Administering immunotherapy in the morning seems to matter. Why?
3k words, 14 minutes reading time
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Are you stuck in movie logic?
Consider just saying what the problem is
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So you want to speak at software conferences?
An article from dylanbeattie.net
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Our phones are killing our ability to feel sexy (2024)
Eros, desire, instinct, eternity
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Why do people leave comments on OpenBenches?
I'm still a believer in the promise of Web 2.0. The idea that giving people a curated space to chat produces tiny sparks of magic. My wife Liz and I have been running the OpenBenches project for about 8 years - it's a crowd-sourced repository of memorial benches. People take a geotagged photo of a bench's plaque…
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Can you complete the Oregon Trail if you wait at a river for 14272 years?
If you're into retro computing, you probably know about Oregon Trail; a simulation of the hardships faced by a group of colonists in 1848 as they travel by covered wagon from Independence Missouri to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The game was wildly successful in the US education market, with the various editions…
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Does X cause Y? An in-depth evidence review (2021)
This summarizes the frustratingly ambiguous state of the evidence for pretty much any "Does X cause Y?" question you might have.
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Math Academy pulled me out of the Valley of Despair
Here’s to being a preserving student for life.
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My Beancount books are 95% automatic after 3 years (2024)
Fang-Pen Lin's blog about programming
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I used to know how to write in Japanese
Somehow, though, I can still read it
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Stamina Is a Quiet Advantage
Stamina is one of the most universally useful traits you can develop. It's a more broadly applicable advantage than things that are situationally useful.
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The Egg (2009)
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
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Finding Flow: Escaping digital distractions through deep work and slow living
Learn how to achieve flow state and defeat digital distractions through environment design, mindful breaks, and deep work practices for a more focused life.
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Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels Apple’s quality is degrading. I spend 10 hours a day on my laptop and would spend any amount of money within reason for a better one. However, everything comes with tradeoffs.
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Developing a food-safe finish for my wooden spoons
You know what they say in the world of products: fast, cheap, good; pick two. That's exactly my experience when trying to find the most suitable wood finish for my hand carved wooden spoons and cups. I got tired of trying to find something food-safe, without chemical smells and that doesn't take ages to cure. So I…
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Documenting an 1115 ft radio tower climb
Some broadcast engineering tasks are a bit too daunting for me to consider. Climbing the massive towers that power radio and TV stations is one of them! Your browser does not support the video tag. Recently, local engineer Aaron Cox had the perfect set of conditions for a drone flight to capture some of that risk, as…
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You are the scariest monster in the woods
We shouldn’t worry about AI destroying society because there’s something scarier out there (it’s us)
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Kakizome: Japanese way of new-years resolution
Kakizome, Japanese way of new-years resolution
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Optimizing my sleep around Claude usage limits
My experiment optimizing my sleep schedule around maximizing my Claude Pro subscription usage.