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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 methylene blue can (and can’t) do for the brain
Methylene blue is touted as yet another universal boost-all, fix-all drug, the ultimate biohacking tool. Find out why that's not exactly true.
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Who Writes Wikipedia?
Part 1: Wikimedia at the Crossroads Part 2: Who Writes Wikipedia? Part 3: Who Runs Wikipedia? Part 4: Making More Wikipedians Part 5: Making More Wikipedias Part 6: Code, and Other Laws
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I got paid to live in Antarctica
Sharing how I got paid to live in Antarctica, how to get a job on the ice, and everything you need to know about life at McMurdo Station.
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Your Most Improbable Life
Your life’s goal should be to become the most improbable person you can be.
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Don't Fly During Ramadan (2013)
A couple of weeks ago, I tried to fly from New York (JFK) to Los Angeles on JetBlue. I was racially profiled, detained, and interrogated for hours.
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Reviving a four year old reMarkable 2
I found my old reMarkable 2 paper tablet, bought in 2021, it had sat unused for ~4 years or so. The device was in a sorry state:
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Shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it
As I watched him on stage, I thought about what made him extraordinary. It’s not his voice. He readily admits that his voice isn’t amazing.
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Notes on the Ivory Coast
I spent about ten days in the Ivory Coast, mostly in Abidjan, but also Yamoussoukro, Man, and Grand Bassam. (Note – The Ivory Coast is so French in culture and temperament that it insists on offici…
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20 Years of Blogging on my own website
I missed it, but last month I had my 20-year blogging anniversary. Let's recap a bit about how it started and how it went.
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A couple neat things about using chemical elements as hostnames
Everyone has their own favorite host naming conventions. Usually it’s something arbitrary, like naming all machines after characters from a TV show.
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Normalization of Deviance
If I was setting up curriculum at a university I’d make an entire semester-long class on The Challenger disaster, and make it required for any remotely STEM-oriented major. Because I think it…
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In praise of the hundred page idea
I prefer a lightweight nonfiction book to a detailed tome. I’m a dilettante of many interests, so my attention for any given topic is more likely to sustain 100 pages than 600. The sweet spot is longer than a longread internet article, but that doesn’t demand a months-long commitment: a 2-3 hour text.
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Fixing Classical Cats: How I got tricked by 28-year-old defensive programming
Every now and then, when working on ScummVM’s Director engine, I run across a disc that charms me so much I just have to get it working right away....
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I had my head examined...
An interactive MRI brain scan of Bill Moorier's head.
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Dostoyevsky's “Dream of a Ridiculous Man” (2014)
“And it is so simple… You will instantly find how to live.”
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How I Monetized My Passion
Find your domain name at HugeDomains. Start using this domain right away.
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Self-published Ansible book – 87k copies, 300k revenue, 41 revisions
I just published the 41st revision of my self-published book Ansible for DevOps, which has sold 87,234 copies as of this writing across LeanPub, Amazon (Kindle and paperback), and iBooks. There are multiples of that number of eBooks downloaded, as I've never DMCA'ed the sites that re-host the book illegally. I just…
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The Best Magazine Articles Ever (2012)
The following are suggestions for the best magazine articles (in English) ever. Stars denote how many times a correspondent has suggested it. Submitter comments are in italics. For a great way to read long-form magazine articles on a tablet device see my review of LongForm and Instapaper here .
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An Opinionated Guide to Machine Learning Research
I originally wrote this guide in back in December 2017 for the OpenAI Fellows program
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My long goodbye to Windows XP (2022)
Making glulam of the tree of knowledge.