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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,746 posts.
Dammit LinkedIn, I'm a college dropout (2009)
Paul Holmes's Gravatar Profile
LLMs may have helped my RSI
Just a place to store my random thoughts and contributions to the world.
Pelicans on a bicycle
I decided to roll out my own LLM benchmark: how well can different models render an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle? I chose that because a) I like …
Puppy (or, details on Joel Spolsky's retirement from blogging)
At right, a picture of Taco, a ten-week-old siberian husky puppy who moved in with us last week! Some of you may have seen my final column in Inc., in which I announce my retirement from blogging …
Observations on tragedy in a digital age
Viewed in the proper light, influencer is a career path of tragic dimensions.
We moderns are status-drunk
Twelve years ago I posted on how our era is a rare unique “dreamtime” of fast growth, wide cultural integration, and delusional beliefs.
Walk and Talk
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.
The Two-Hour Rule
This all-content, junk-free website's biggest source of support is when you use those or any of these links to approved sources when you get anything, regardless of the country in which you live. Thanks for helping me help you! Ken.
Get specific (2008)
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.
Things I’ve Learned from Charlie Munger about Moats (2015)
1. “We have to have a business with some inherent characteristics that give it a durable competitive advantage.” Professor Michael Porter calls barriers to market entry that a business may have…
Types of Legal Argument
I have been teaching about legal reasoning and legal argumentation for years. When I do so, I try to impress upon students that legal argume...
Life lessons from differential equations (2015)
Some problems simply have no solution. Some problems have no simple solution. Some problems have many solutions. ...
When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (2007)
This story is part of Cory Doctorow’s 2007 short story collection “Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present,” published by Thunder’s Mouth, a division of Avalon Books. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, about which you’ll find more at the end of this file.
Start In The Middle
Middle in the start you shall.
The Beatles’ collaborative notes: Three ways to write a song
"Just say whatever comes into your head each time..."
Linguistic Harbingers of Betrayal
In life, love, war, and planetary colonization, even long-lasting friendships can end if one betrays the other's trust for his own gain. We studied the language of betrayal by observing players of Diplomacy , the game that ruins friendships . In this very popular game, players can form alliances and try to conquer the…
Flipping until you are lost
Start with any triangulation of a convex polygon, and then repeatedly choose a random diagonal and flip it, replacing the two triangles it borders with two d...
Eating Fruit Skins
This summer, I learned that one can eat a whole apple. Every part of the apple is edible 1 . Before learning this, I would just eat the flesh and throw away the core. The core seemed hard and jagged and inedible. Turns out, you can eat the whole thing. I suppose I’ve always known that deer eat the whole apple. Why…