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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 560 posts.
Like many people, I’ve been entertaining myself at home by baking a ton. I’ve gotten pretty good at following recipes, but I decided I wanted to take things one step further and understand the science behind what differentiates a cake from a bread or a cookie. I also like machine learning so I thought: what if I could…
The joys, challenges, and some practical aspects of retiring young.
I needed medication to preserve my sight, and it had to be injected directly into my eyeball. It’s a real thing and not just something they do in horror films.
Two decades ago, before social media existed, Zygmunt Bauman articulated a perfect description of how it would soon shape our behavior and frame our relationships to one another.
I saw a gif of a woman talking about how women make less than men in the film industry, ending with ‘the only industry where women make more than men is porn!’ Her point was about the o…
Why don't facts change our minds? This article explains the logic of false beliefs and proposes a better system for constructive conversation.
WhatsApp's rise and recent PR efforts highlight a class of business models that I call "user domestication".
If coming from Google: Click here to refresh this page, bringing all the related posts together. I found this ancient Egyptian stool on the British Museum’s website in early 2020 and fell in …
David shares the paradox of abundance and how to make a healthy information diet for yourself. Read here.
Do you have lots of unfinished books? Here is a new ADHD friendly approach to reading books
This isn’t the first time I’ve received an e-mail like this: Hey! I’ve done my research and looked at a lot of facts and old forgotten archives. I know that you are Satoshi, I do not want to tell anyone about this. I just wanted to say that you created weapons of mass destruction where niches remained poor and the…
Regardless of where you are in the pathway of understanding how the human psyche works, this list of must-read psychology books will upgrade your personal library.
For as long as I have been learning web development () I have been taking notes. Partly notes to help clarify my understanding of something and partly for...
Let us start with an assumption that most of us already suspect to be true: that civilization will not survive more than a few centuries into the future. If that sad assertion be true, then what will the earth look like in the far future? There was a television show some years ago entitled “Life After People”. It did…
Some reflections on trusting trust, and how deep the rabbit hole goes.
How the Internet Transforms the Individual into a Conspiracy of One
David Foster Wallace's remarkable 2005 commencement speech, This is Water, is a timeless trove of wisdom for living a meaningful life. Here is a full transcript along with audio.
This article by Dr Piotr Wozniak is part of SuperMemo Guru series on memory, learning, creativity, and problem solving.
I made a custom guitar with hot-swappable pickups
One of the repeating motifs of recruiting in the software industry are mantras of “talent”: “We recruit the best talent”, “talent attracts talent”, “we value talent” and so on. Some companies have so called “head of talent”, “talent acquisition”, “talent development” professionals on their payroll - basically a…
A first lesson in meta-rationality, or stage 5 cognition, using Bongard problems as a laboratory.
This article is supported by my Patreon. If you like what you see, please consider contributing. I feel like hard counters get a bad rap in RTS games. There are a lot of arguments out there both fo…
September 2011 Unless the people benefit, economic growth is a subsidy for the rich. —Richard Falk, “Post-Mubarak Revolutionary Chances,” Al Jazeera , 22 Feb. 2011 It’s as silly for me to write about economics as it would be for most economists to write about the use of enjambment in iambic p
Posted on Friday 27 Aug 2021. 776 words, 2 links. By Matt Webb.
How I “failed” at a YC startup, worked at early Stripe, and then raised $20M
