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Trapped priors as a basic problem of rationality
P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.
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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 560 posts.
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So you want to write a technical book
If you’re knowledgeable in a technical field, writing a book to teach others a few things can be a rewarding experience on many different levels. With the many avenues available for self-publishing these days, an important question to ask yourself is “Do I need a publisher?”. The answer depends on your particular…
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Greenland Sharks
Greenland shark swimming under an ice flow in the Canadian arctic WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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No one gives a shit what programming language you use
I’ve had it up to here (gestures at nose level) with the bullshit around programming language elitism. Back when I thought it mattered I was just as bad as the bullshit I’m seeing today…
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How to write good prompts: using spaced repetition to create understanding
Using spaced repetition to create understanding
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A Meta-Scientific Perspective on Thinking: Fast and Slow (2020)
2011 was an important year in the history of psychology, especially social psychology. First, it became apparent that one social psychologist had faked results for dozens of publications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel). Second, a highly respected journal published an article with the incredible claim…
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Dear self: we need to talk about social media
Last year I discovered, much to my chagrin, that always-on internet socializing was costly for me. This was inconvenient both because I’d spent rather a lot of time singing the praises of social me…
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Sending Emails to Myself
In April, I wrote operatornotify.py , a module which allows my programs to notify me of important information or errors. I was immediately very proud of it. It felt awesome to get so much impact out of a sub-100 line module as I went around hooking it up to my existing programs and getting the tracebacks from my…
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I would like closure, but I'll take honesty
The New York Times is special.
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Are you playing to play, or playing to win?
Make sure you're playing the real game, not some more complicated game you've made up for yourself.
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Why 'Long Rituals' Matter
The Long-termist's Field Guide: 1,000 Ideas For The Next 1,000 Years
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Lessons from a year of AI research
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
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The strange path of accepting how your brain works
I recently read Turing’s Cathedral, a book about the early history of computers, and it largely focused on the life and brilliant times of John von Neumann, who was, to put it simply, a genius. It is both fascinating and disappointing to learn about a brain that works so much better than your own. Fascinating because…
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Useful and useless code comments
I’ve been reading John Ousterhout’s A Philosophy of Software Design . At one point in the book, he gives this advice about code comments: Unfortunately, many…
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In defense of interesting writing on controversial topics
Some thoughts on the New York Times' Slate Star Codex profile
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The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter
Reading time: 15 minutes There are many significant differences between Latin and its linguistic descendants, the Romance languages. One that stands out from the rest is grammatical gender. Latin h…
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What’s the origin of the phrase “big data doesn’t fit in excel”?
Welcome to Yak Shaving School! As part of my MSc I'm reading a book about Data Analytics. So I've been chasing down quotes to find their origin. One paper had this popular quote in it (emphasis added): As with many rapidly emerging concepts, Big Data has been variously defined and operationalized, ranging from trite…
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Book Review: Double Fold
Finalist #6 of the book review contest
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Quality and Effort (2018)
It seems as though the opposite of “careless” ought to be “careful.” That the best way to avoid avoidable errors is to try harder, to put more care into the work. This means…
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Writing a Technical Book
AndreGarzia.com website
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5 Important Things to Do Before the Market Bubble Bursts
Yes, you are living through a bubble in the financial markets. No, this is not an article about how to time the market. No, you don’t know when the bubble will burst (and neither do I). Yes, there are still things that you can do that will set you up for investing success.
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Crony Beliefs
[Note: if you prefer audio, you can listen to this essay narrated by Grognor on his excellent podcast Second Enumerations . —Ed. ]
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The Curious Case of IKEA Vocabulary
Part of what makes IKEA unique is their product names. Each name means something, often in a funny or ambigious way. When IKEA went international, they decided to use the same Swedish names everywhere. This makes sense from an organizational sanity standpoint, but it deprives most of the world of this particular joy.
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How to manually merge two Apple IDs to one (2020)
Since 2020 is made for pain, I decided to make some big moves that I have been putting off for a while. The email migration took a while, but the new setup is so much better. My reliance on Google as a company is very minimal now. I am very
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