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Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,744 posts.
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No More Fear
Here’s the country I want to be a citizen of: the one that decides to buy comfort and convenience by deploying courage.
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Be sceptical of your own work (2009)
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field. (Niels Bohr) If you unexpectedly find a problem solving itself almost effortlessly, and you can’t quite …
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Greens: why we eat the leaves that we do (2013)
Jeanne reveals which branches of the evolutionary tree of plants bear edible leaves and speculates about why that is. Most of the 300,000 + plant species have leaves, and the function of all of the…
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What you know matters more than what you do
Insight into Impact I recently had an interesting conversation with some colleagues. We were talking about a young researcher in our field who happens to ... Read more
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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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Seneca on the proper use of time
Yesterday I wrote about the impending death of the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks. I was particularly struck by this line from Sachs’ public goodbye
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Public Staircases
Create beautiful emails, automate campaigns, and track performance. Try it now and see how our tools can drive your business.
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Things and Stuff of 2019
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2019. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
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In Memoriam: John W. Addison, my PhD advisor
John Addison (1930–2025) died March 7, 2025, at the age of 95. He was my PhD advisor at UC Berkeley, and I count myself extraordinarily lucky to have worked under his guidance. My condolences go ou…
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English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)
English is a (relatively) simple language to learn enough of to communicate (rather than to master) because it’s had so many non-native adults learning and using it.
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Driving 1725km in an electric car in 2 days
At 6:30 PM on Wednesday August 4 th my 15-year-old daughter and I pulled up the Jaguar I-Pace electric car in front of my 91-year-old Mom’s place in Regina, Saskatchewan. I was tired and achey because I’d just finished driving 1,725km (1,072 miles) across two days to see her for the first time since Covid started. I…
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And yet It Understands
In high-dimensional vector spaces, numerical optimization is omnipotent.
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Bring back the ease of 80s and 90s personal computing
Desktop computer systems, especially those based on Linux, are way more complicated than typical personal computers in the 80s and 90s. We…
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Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
I just finished Oliver Sacks’ excellent Everything in Its Place. In it, he mentioned as an aside that the Ginkgo biloba tree is hundreds of millions of years old, and its phenotype has been practically frozen since then – a living fossil.
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A Chemical Hunger: Mysteries
The study of obesity is the study of mysteries.
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Improving sleep
Things I tried to improve bad sleep quality.
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The Zero-Sum Bias: When people think that everything is a competition
The zero-sum bias occurs when people mistakenly expect gains and losses to be directly balanced in a situation where they’re not, especially in terms of one party benefiting directly at the expense of others. For example, the zero-sum bias can cause someone to think that a resource they’re interested in is limited…
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Why drinking coffee in Iran has become so complicated
It all started with a sarcastic jab in a chat: “You shouldn’t be more Catholic than the Pope. You go to order a coffee, and the guy’s like, ‘From Kenyan farms or Brazil?’ It’s l...
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The number line freaks me out (2016)
“Welcome to math class, boys and girls! Today we’ll be drawing a picture that gestures beyond the limits of mortal comprehension.”
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Warm up your MacBook (2019)
Who else hates putting their hands on an icy metal laptop after it's been riding outside in your cold backpack? Here's a one-line solution.
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How I stay reasonably anonymous online (2022)
I'm not wanted by the FBI, nor am I worried about my ISP watching me, and I don't care about Google knowing what I search for. What I am worried about is cra...