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Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 588 posts.
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When feedback is not a gift
Feedback is the lifeblood of getting better, but be careful who you accept feedback from.
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What I learned using private LLMs to write an undergraduate history essay
I used private and public LLMs to answer an undergraduate essay question I spent a week working on nearly 30 years ago, in an effort to see how the experience would have changed in that time. There were two rules:
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You can't reach the brain through the ears
Why do we have to learn everything the hard way?
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I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one
I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one.
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Programming is hard
Software is weird. In its basic form, software is this very abstract thing with seemingly little connection to the real world. Yet graphical applications running on a hardware device like a modern phone feel very real, even to people who have no appreciation of what happens within this “black box”. Some pieces of…
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The Erosion of Free Will: Why Society's Loss of Belief in Freedom Is Dangerous
Pay attention to how people are talking about freedom. It's a leading indicator of cultural (and economic) trends.
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Where do our atoms come from?
Falling down a rabbit hole
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Against Alcohol (2022)
A review of ‘Drink?: The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health’
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Humans Need Play
On a vicious pattern that breeds burnout.
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Advice to a novice programmer
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Building a second income stream by writing a book
Spoiler: It’s quite possibly the hardest way to build a passive income stream.
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How to find your blind spots
You probably aren't qualified to dissect your own failures because you're the idiot who screwed everything up.
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Story Behind Hackathon Photo
How a random stream of events ended up creating a picture with 57 million views
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How my brother's iCloud account was stolen
My brother got his iPhone stolen at gunpoint. This is the story of how he lost control of his iCloud account first (along with years of priceless memories, including my nephew's first steps) and how this couldn't have happened without Apple's incompetent support.
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Why it’s necessary to shoot yourself in the foot
Without shooting yourself in the foot, learning lacks motivation. Complexity without reason is really confusing.
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Why you can't Kickstart a conference
FAMILIA88 membangun komunitas digital dengan pendekatan kolaboratif dan suasana kekeluargaan sehingga setiap pencapaian memiliki makna yang bertahan lama.
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In practice, cool URLs can become inaccessible even if they don't change
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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What’s the point of tech conferences?
It’s con season in the tech world. Yesterday evening I flew from Pluralsight’s Link/ unconference in New Orleans to Pycon US in Salt Lake City. New Orleanians are just as likely as not …
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Please be dying, but not too quickly, part 2: The patient's perspective
The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing: from investigator calls to taking back (almost) all the bad things I've ever said about New Jersey
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Earning the privilege to work on unoriginal problems
The startup world is almost by definition a place where you “live in the future”. Working in an early-stage startup, your whole belief system is based on being able to successfully create something new. Something that will become a great and cherished product, used all around the world. It needs to be this way, or…
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I prefer semi-automation
I really try to automate part of my work. But I do not always strive to automate the task at hand entirely. I have come to realize, at least for my usual duties, that automation is a balance between the productivity and consistency gains you would get from not doing it by hand versus the time it would take to cover…
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Recreating Medieval English Ales (1998)
In medieval England, ale was an alcoholic drink made from grain, water, and fermented with yeast. The difference between medieval ale and beer was that beer also used hops as an ingredient. Virtually everyone drank ale. It provided significant nutrition as well as hydration (and inebriation). The aristocracy could…
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Do painters subconsciously paint themselves into their work?
The Renaissance history of automimesis, and a proposal for research
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Why you’re going about recovering from perfectionism all wrong (2021)
Stop murdering your village of weirdos.
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The Heart of W. Edwards Deming
“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” —Lao Tzu