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Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,743 posts.
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What data on myself I collect and why (2020)
How I am using 50+ sources of my personal data
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Pee If You Want to Go Deeper (2021)
While I’m usually blogging about triathlon, today I want to discuss one of my other hobbies, scuba diving. Diving in the UK usually requires diving in a dry suit (not always, but trust me, it’s a LOT more comfortable). One of the biggest concerns that many have is about how to deal with the bladder
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How we gave colors names and it messed with our brains (part II)
Update: This post was an Editor’s pick by Cristy Gelling at Science Seeker, and was included in Bora Zivkovic’s top 10 science blog posts of the week. Lately, I’ve got colors on t…
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You Don't Need to Be Brilliant to Do Brilliant Work
My friend Csongor recently published a computer science paper that’s super interesting if you’re as big a nerd as I am. The details are too much to go into here, but suffice to say, it lets us do a lot of things I’d always been told were impossible.
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The Feynman Technique: The Best Way to Learn Anything (2012)
Master the Feynman Technique: Nobel laureate's 4-step learning method to understand anything deeply through teaching, simplification, and systematic review.
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Simple Truths Smart People Forget
Some of the smartest people I know continuously struggle to get ahead because they forget to address a few simple truths that collectively govern our potential to make progress. So here’s a …
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Hellbanned from Hacker News
Yesterday I submitted a post on Hacker News out of frustration at moderators pedantically changing post titles. After quickly rising to the number two spot on the front page with 482 points and 37 comments, the post was deleted by a moderator, presumably the operator of the site, Paul Graham.
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Worldbuilding
There is a grand tradition of scientifically minded science fiction authors creating not just the characters in their novels but also the brass tacks scientific details of the planets they reside on. This is the art and science of Worldbuilding .
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“Working Too Hard And Not Getting Anywhere”
Continuing the case method on MBA Mondays, I am going to tell a story about a business model pivot that was not a full business pivot. In the lull between Flatiron and Union Square Ventures, I made a few angel investments and the best one was in a company called TACODA that went on to […]
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PinePhone review after a month of daily driving
All opinions are my own, and most of the review is for my own use-cases. There are some comparisons, mostly for entertainment purposes, to iOS (based on my previous device, iPhone 12 Pro) and Android (based on my current device, de-googled OnePlus Nord N10 5G).
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To grieve, or not to grieve?
Recent events in the field of AI for mathematics have shown us beyond all reasonable doubt that the field is currently undergoing a rapid transformation, unlike anything that we have ever seen befo…
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Advice for ambitious 19 year olds
“I’m an ambitious 19 year old, what should I do?” I get asked this question fairly often, and I now have a lot of data on what works, so I thought I’d share my response. Usually, people are...
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Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking
I’ve been surprised by - and enjoy - one aspect of using large language models more than any other. They often put into words things I have long understood, but could not write down clearly. When that happens, it feels less like learning something new and more like recognition. A kind of “ok, yeah" moment.…
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Job loss and cortisone mania
On the morning of 18th August, I got invited at short notice into a 1:1 meeting by my manager, which was unusual . I think I knew what was coming, and I was right: The company is restructuring, and I’m being let go (among a lot of other people). I had time until lunch to say my goodbyes to my colleagues as I would be…
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Languages I want to write
I spent this weekend writing a Forth designed for music synthesis, and it reminded me what a joy writing programming languages is! I have a big list of programming language experiments that I want to try, but it's mostly been in my head so far. Here's a living document of some of the languages I want to write.
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You and Your Research (1986)
Transcription of the Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar 7 March 1986
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Woz: 'I Am the Happiest Person'
Link to: https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23765914&cid=65583466
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Review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now
It’s not every day that I check my office mailbox and, amid the junk brochures, find 500 pages on the biggest questions facing civilization—all of them, basically—by possibly the …
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Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker
Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker : Effectively speaking, I've always been a Vim user. When I got my first shell account, I started with Vim (In the Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic ages of `vi`, `vim` and `neovim`, I came of age somewhere in the late Jurassic): my
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Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Awards
parker higgins is an artist and activist in brooklyn, new york
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The Need to Grind Concrete Examples Before Jumping Up a Level of Abstraction
If you go directly to the most abstract ideas then you’re basically like a kid who reads a book of famous quotes about life and thinks they understand everything about life by way of those quotes.
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What makes music sound “good?”
When listening to music, however, we are not just listening to a series of disconnected instants. Instead, the way things sound depends on the notes we have heard. In other words, we integrate over time . One of the most important functions of a musical scale is to limit the overall pitch content of what we're hearing…