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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 473 posts.
In the past 12 months my body’s mobility and flexibility went from abysmal, a source of persistent pain impacting my quality of life, to pretty darn good. I’m not about to become a stretching influencer, but after a year of researching, trial and error, and hard work I feel back on track and like I... Continue reading…
How to maximize 10x work and avoid thoughtless daily 1x work routines
I’ve been using the Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 as my daily driver for a few years now. Laptops (gaming laptops especially) pack a lot of heat-generating components in a small and thin space, where the only airflow comes from the small blower fans in the system. In the case of the Zephyrus G15, there’s approximately 120…
Developing ideas is the central aspect of many professions, including—but certainly not limited to—academic research and software development. It is my impression that we often consider ideas, or creativity in general, to be some magical binary property: you either have ideas and are a creative mastermind, or not. The…
A free survey course on LLMs, taught by practitioners.
Quick, inexpensive, made-to-order treatments
At the risk of stating the obvious even more obviously than I usually do: sometimes the perfect approach involves tolerating imperfection. Imperfection?! Yes. Specifically, the more macroscopic one’s view becomes, the more microscopic imperfections may need to be tolerated — if they don’t matter to the goal, or the
Hey, I feel like I'm at a big crossroads and this is an important blog post, but you probably already guessed that from the title.
Disclaimer: I have never personally met Bryan Johnson. Reading this again, I realized that this article is quite harsh at times. Overall, I do like him and I am grateful that someone like Bryan exists as he is propelling the whole field of longevity forward by making it more popular. I also like the way […]
At several points throughout history, someone has sat down to watch a ballet; a long and complex performance with multiple dancers and changes of music and style, and at the end of it, said: “someh…
Use DIY CAN bus tools to convert your car into the best sim rig ever
Haskell’s expressive type system means that type signatures can carry a lot of information. Haskell’s polymorphism means that you sometimes write functions that work across an enormous range of types, and are left wondering “what do I actually call my variables?”. It is often the case that there’s nothing to say…
For the past two years, I’ve been on the receiving end of a passive aggressive win-back campaign from Dropbox. The feud originally started when I migrated away from Dropbox and hence canceled my subscription while leaving them saddled with over a terabyte of my data to carry forever, like a camel in the digital…
First we discussed the fact that technical issues cause remote meetings to suck. Then, we discussed how even when there are no technical issues, remote meetings still suck. They suck because they e…
Using thermal physics, cosmology, and computer science to calculate password vulnerability to the biggest possible brute-force attack.
Road numbering is a system with clear rules. What happens when the people responsible for numbering roads don't follow them?
My founder friends constantly think about growth. They think about how to measure their business growth and how to get to the next order of magnitude scale. If they’re making $1M ARR today, they think about how to get to $10M ARR. If they have 1,000 users today, they think about how to get to 10,000 users.
When I was working in the Cairns Casino I’d often arrive on the floor to replace a guy who had been in the industry as long as casinos had b...
I spent nearly five years working at the nutrition startup Lifesum in Stockholm, where we built a mobile app for tracking your diet and exercise.
If you find this piece worthwhile, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding ongoing cancer care. A story from Dan Luu, from back when he “TA’ed EE 202, a second year class on signals and systems at P…
Image courtesy of UC Davis. Photographer: Don EdwardsJust in time for cucumber season, some news that surprises me. Did you know that you should store cucumbers at room temperature?Credit for my enlightenment goes to UC Davis.
I just did a massive spring cleaning of one of my servers, trying to clean up what has become quite the mess of clutter. For every website on the server, I either:
Kurt greeted us in his beautiful 19th century house and in his bare feet (of which more later). As the interview progressed it grew sort of
Joseph Brodsky, on being grateful
