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Advice for academic refugees
Recently I met a new coworker, a now-former professor who left academia.
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 715 posts.
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The IKEA Effect – Why managers fall in love with their own ideas
When and why the IKEA effect causes people to overvalue their own ideas. Examples of organisational pitfalls of the IKEA effect. 4 ways you can defend against the IKEA effect: 1) Acknowledge your unconscious bias; 2) Spike rough prototypes; 3) Talk to customers; 4) Run growth experiments
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Observations on 6 Years of Journaling
My thoughts and experiences on how writing a daily journal improved my memory and understanding of myself.
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Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”
I like folders due to their cross compatibility, future proofing, interoperability, flexibility, focus, clarity, automation management &etc.
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A brief reflection on Mac software stagnation
I’ve been feeling a certain stagnation in Mac software these past few years. In this piece I try to understand why.
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People took some potassium and lost some weight
In November 2021, we finished our series A Chemical Hunger, where we argue that the obesity epidemic is the result of environmental contaminants, and that one of those contaminants might be lithium…
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Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
Most people sense that school today is poor preparation for the world of work. I think there is a fundamental reason why: linearity. School is a
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Taste vs. Skills
A simple mental model that can help you navigate your career.
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Restarting my career after motherhood
My story so far!
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I finally found a use case for my Raspberry Pi Model B+
I take a severely underpowered computer and make it do something useful.
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So I lost my OpenBSD FDE password (2016)
The other day I set up a new OpenBSD instance with a nice RAID array, encrypted with Full Disk Encryption. And promptly proceeded to forget part of the passphrase.
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Writing a book for O'Reilly
Part One of a series on how I came to be writing for O’reilly, and what the process is like
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Digital Gardening in Obsidian
Observing growth in my notes without being overwhelmed.
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Programming as Play
I often want to program something just for fun without any expectations. But why? Well, a recent scientific paper investigated this idea of programming as play.
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A principled way to solve problems
Today I’m writing some short thoughts on how to design solutions or decide on actions when you face a new problem. TL;DR constantly ask yourself what you are trying to do. One of the main lessons I’ve learned in this short time working in research (as an intern), is to be methodological. Especially when you are doing…
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Those writing extensively on note-writing rarely have a serious context of use
Much of the day-to-day thinking involved in creative work is simply lost, like sand castles in the tide. Ephemerality can actually be useful in low-fidelity thought, but it’s simply an accidental property in many cases. We should do our serious thinking in the form of Evergreen notes so that the thinking accumulates.
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The art of sharpening pencils (2007)
See all the popular styles and methods of sharpening pencils and learn a few tricks too.
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To Become Wise, Do Less
Embrace leisure and abhor the need to always be productive to actually become productive
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Hi, hello, I’m back at it
*peeks hesitantly around the corner* Hey everyone. Tomorrow, after almost 7 months of a sabbatical break, I’m resuming regular publication of kottke.org. (Actua