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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,746 posts.
The day was nearing to a close. The sun has already set, but that Friday evening in Amsterdam was still warm. Unusually warm, in fact, for those late days in March – as if spring decided to bless my pilgrimage, for that pilgrimage was not jovial. I was sitting at a ramen joint, sipping on the broth. To my left, a…
This page is part of the "e-mail archives" section of a site, Plato and his dialogues , dedicated to developing a new interpretation of Plato's dialogues. The "e-mail archives" section includes HTML edited versions of posts that I submitted on various e-mail discussion lists about Plato and ancient philosophy. Note: I…
AndreGarzia.com website
“We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.” — Aldous Huxley, Island It was cold out, but none of us were cold. I sat with five men in the mountains of Montana. As the sun set, the fire […]
From Medieval sword-fighters to Broca’s brains, or why the hand may hold the key to the link between creativity and mental illness.
My Macbook Pro I have a Macbook pro retina 15 inch, that I bought in 2016. A few days back, the battery started bulking up and the laptop ha...
I come across a lot of advice daily, but there was one piece of advice that stuck out to me recently. This is what not to do in life.
We do it dozens of times a day, every day, but why do we call it logging in? “Log in” is one of those phrases that sounds weirder the more you say it. It’s ubiquitous in online li…
Jeff Bezos tells a great story about the smartest guy he knew at Princeton. He and a classmate were working on a really tough partial differential equation and getting nowhere. They spent 3 hours on the problem and gave up.
I made a little plugin for Obsidian: Note Codes.
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…
[This is an excerpt from the Dance of the Possible: the mostly honest, completely irreverent guide to creativity] When you are known as a writer about creativity, people send you interesting things…
In 2008, Paul Graham wrote How To Disagree Better, ranking arguments on a scale from name-calling to explicitly refuting the other person’s central point. And that’s why, ever since 200…
I was recently lucky enough to be invited along on a trip to Sizewell Bs operations training centre to see and try their control room simulator.
Jacob Collier is the internet’s favorite musical virtuoso. Here’s his mostly acapella arrangement of a Christmas carol called “In The Bleak Midwinter.” The most remarkable p…
A Flawed Axiom Write every day. If you’ve ever considered professional writing, you’ve heard this advice. Stephen King recommends it in his instructional memoir, On ... Read more
You know Jean Shepherd as author of the beloved A Christmas Story. But before that, he conspired to get a book that didn't exist onto The New York Times Best Seller List. Read how he pulled off the Hoax of the Century.
Vocabulary is a tool for creating and categorising mental models. Here’s how it works and how to leverage it.
Myth: Programmers get to write code all day. Truth: Most programmers spend a ton of time (in no particular order): Carefully composing e-mails to other programmers/mailing lists/non-technical folks…
Temperature is certainly a factor when growing ice spikes, and we have done experiments that show that spikes are more likely to form when the temperature is just below freezing (see the graphs below). I'm not entirely sure why this is so, but I suspect that the ice tube freezes shut before the tube gets very long if…
Last June I placed some photographic film into a tin cannister with a small hole punched into its side. The tin cannister was then attached to a clothes pole in my backgarden and left.
I was fortunate enough to help organize the Strange Loop 2011 conference , but this post is not specifically about that. During the confere...
I’m trying to build a jigsaw puzzle. I wish I could show you what it will be, but the picture isn’t on the box. But I can show you some of the pieces that snapped into place this year, and try to share a context for why they mattered so much to me.
