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The hero's journey of getting laid off
Culture, technology, & travel once or twice a week. Click to read Back to Humanity, a Substack publication.
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,746 posts.
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Two Years of Vanlife: A Retrospective
This is our most EPIC post to date: two years of vanlife condensed into one article! Tales from the road, van talk, lessons learned, etc. MUST READ!
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A dictionary of single-letter variable names
Haskell’s expressive type system means that type signatures can carry a lot of information. Haskell’s polymorphism means that you sometimes write functions that work across an enormous range of types, and are left wondering “what do I actually call my variables?”. It is often the case that there’s nothing to say…
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Should you work fixed hours, even if you have a flexible schedule?
The beauty of having a flexible schedule, when you are a freelancer, remote worker, or consultant, is being able to work whenever you like. When traveling, you can spend the whole day touring and working at night. Or maybe working in the morning and night, and enjoying the evenings. Whatever you want, it’s your call…
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Toward a Better Music Theory (2013)
Update: a version of this post appeared on Slate.com. I seem to have touched a nerve with my rant about the conventional teaching of music theory and how poorly it serves practicing musicians. I th…
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Sysop Chat
Back in mid-90s before anyone I knew had an Internet connection, a few of us had modems and would use them to call bulletin board systems via the phone line. On these systems what to me seemed the main thing was discussions and chat. For the first time I could talk to other like-minded people, and just being able to…
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Dropbox keeps threatening to delete my files
For the past two years, I’ve been on the receiving end of a passive aggressive win-back campaign from Dropbox. The feud originally started when I migrated away from Dropbox and hence canceled my subscription while leaving them saddled with over a terabyte of my data to carry forever, like a camel in the digital…
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Eastern European Guide to Writing Reference Letters
Excruciating. One phrase I often use to describe what it's like to read reference letters for Eastern European applicants to PhD and Master's programs in Cambridge. Even objectively outstanding students often receive dull, short, factual, almost negative-sounding reference letters. This is a result of (A)...
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Thoughts on Growing Old
You spend the first part of your life trying to be old, trying to convince everyone that you're older than you are, that you're just as good...
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Cut out everything that's not surprising (2019)
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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The thing that brought me joy
The code is not the point, but what if it’s the reason?
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Grades of quality of Panama hats
Grades of Quality of Panama Hats by Brent Black, the world's leading designer of fine quality Montecristi Panaman Hats.
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Reversible and irreversible decisions (2018)
When decisions are reversible, speed them up. The biggest risk is dragging your feet. When decisions are irreversible, slow them down. The biggest risk is making the wrong decision.
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Mental model examples and their explanations
50+ mental model examples and their explanations. There are five categories: success, decision-making, biases, business, and human nature:
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My Year in Review: 2019
Here are some of the things I’m most proud of from 2019, and some of the biggest lessons I’ve learned.
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A Healthy Diet For The Mind
I've been enjoying teaching Intelligent Systems again this semester. A big part of the fun is re-reading old papers. I had a lot of fun re-reading and thinking about the ideas in William Clancey 's classic paper, Heuristic Classification . Long-time readers may recall me mentioning this paper in a long-ago post about…
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Why I regret going to TechCrunch Disrupt
Several months ago I decided to bring my startup from Ottawa, Canada and exhibit in Startup Ally at TechCrunch Disrupt. What better place than Disrupt to absorb insight, meet visionaries and explor…
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Under-Investigated Fields
Nominations for fields that are not being researched as much as they should be
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My “Investment Mindset”
The year was 2007. I was a college student attending a 24-hour hackathon where we had had to build something on top of live trucking data. We were given an API that sent GPS and other metadata for 100 trucks roaming across Europe, the data updating every five seconds.
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My Distributed Systems Seminar's Reading List for Spring 2017
Below is the first draft list of papers I plan to discuss in my distributed systems seminar in the Spring semester. If you have some suggest...