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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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Revenge bedtime procrastination
Revenge bedtime procrastination occurs when people delay going to sleep in order to feel in control of their life and schedule. This phenomenon is particularly associated with people who feel that they have little time for themselves during the day, for example due to their work schedule, so they delay sleep until…
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The Bitter Truth of Learning: It’s Tough, Unpleasant, and Often Pointless
Sometimes an insignificant interaction, or an excerpt from a book, is capable of provoking a life-changing insight. It might be an obvious lesson, but it feels epiphanic because it fits differently into my understanding of things. For instance…
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Being good isn't enough
Giving good career advice is hard. Maybe it’s because careers can look more alike than they really are. Two people can have the same title but what helps one...
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Everything Is a Practice
There is no finish line. There is no winning, no losing.
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It’s a Unix system I know this
I think the average person knows that programming isn’t quite the same as it is in the movies. But, sometimes, it is.
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How to Train an AI Image Model on Yourself
It takes less than an hour and $3.
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What Makes a Good Conversation?
This blog post is about the NAACL 2019 paper What makes a good conversation? How controllable attributes affect human judgments by Abigail See, Stephen Rolle...
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The Stupid Programmer Manifesto
I'm not smart enough for modern web development, and that's ok
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Ubuntu Snap update spoiled my World Cup Final
Goodbye Ubuntu, Goodbye Snaps I missed two goals in the World Cup Finals because of this. It’s not the first time Snap has been a problem, but it’s most definitely the last straw. What happened? I was happily watching the second half of the Fifa World Cup Final, using “ShowMax” – a South African paid … Continue…
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Pasta Cooking Time
I generally find the numbers printed on pasta boxes for cooking time far too high: I'll set the timer for a minute below their low-end "al dente" time, and when I taste one it's already getting too mushy. I decided to run a small experiment to get a better sense of how cooked I like pasta. I decided to use Market…
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Dealing with Insomnia
A couple of months ago I received a present, a small book titled ‘Why we sleep’ by Matthew walker. It is an interesting book that takes you through the physiological and psychological effects of sleeping and the damage done by lack of sleep. I don’t necessarily subscribe to each and every bit in the book, there are…
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Why are we even doing all this?
[This is a guest post by Rikab Gambhir. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] First, they came for the artists, and I did not speak out…
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My Favourite Laptop
I’m not a big owner of things, but the best laptop I’ve ever owned is a roughed-up 2015 Thinkpad X250.
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Don't Get Distracted (2017)
I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people. But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time.
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There's no point at which turning your brain off will work
In early 2025, I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs 1 . They would have an LLM take an action (summarize text, write some code, etc.), and just assume that it worked 2 . This generally didn't work in early 2025 and the result was often quite silly.
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Experts have it easy (2024)
Something that’s painfully understudied is how experts are more efficient than novices while achieving better results.
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My Subconscious Is a Better Developer Than I Am
In which I wonder if my subconscious is a better developer than I am, as solutions seem to come to mind, bypassing the work I consciously put in.
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A love letter to flashcards
A personal reflection on how spaced repetition and hand crafted flashcards helps me to keep understanding alive
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An invitation to a secret society
Or: why you should be a lizard
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