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How a Diode Changed My Life
When you are a child, everything seems fascinating, almost everything is magical because you don't know the boundaries of what you have to discover yet.
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,741 posts.
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Internet Search Tips
A description of advanced tips and tricks for effective Internet research of papers/books, with real-world examples.
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8,760 Hours: How to get the most out of next year
Update (December 2016): Version 2 of this guide is now available! Announcement post here. Links in this post are updated to send you to the latest and greatest version. Click here to download 8,760 Hours v2 The end of a year […]
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How to Stop Endless Discussions
When we find ourselves in endless debates where everyone defends their idea, we don't know how to handle the situation. We eventually find a way out, but what we need is an excellent system.
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My Struggle with Doom Scrolling
Reading, writing, cooking, and maybe some other random explorations.
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Shrinkflation, SanDisk Style
A cheap USB stick and the marketing around it caused disappointment, more at 11.
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Open Sauce is a confoundingly brilliant Bay Area event
This is the second year I brought my Dad (a now-retired radio engineer and co-host of Geerling Engineering) to Open Sauce, a Bay Area maker faire-like event, dreamed up by William Osman and featuring hundreds of exhibits ranging from mad science, to vintage electronics, to games, to world-record-breaking Rubik's Cube…
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The Remarkable Brain Waves of High Level Meditators [video]
What’s going on in the brains of people who meditate? Anecdotal evidence suggests that meditation does something to people’s minds and bodies…quiets and calms t
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Mentoring in Gaza's first hackathon
Engineer
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The Surprising Power of Documentation
Explore the power of proper documentation in this comprehensive guide. Understand how documentation serves as a secret weapon for CTOs, eliminating guesswork, speeding up onboarding, and enhancing productivity in startups. We delve into the importance of documentation in knowledge sharing, reducing the need for…
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Computer Science Curriculum in 1000 YouTube Videos
This is The Entire Computer Science Curriculum in 1000 YouTube Videos. The curriculum is going to be organized in 40 courses in total, further organized in 4 academic years...
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Ang Lee and the uncertainty of success
Recently I was going through some old things I had put away for safekeeping, and I found these: In 1993 I interviewed film director Ang Lee before the US premiere of his second movie, “The Wedding …
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Unlearning descriptive statistics
If you've ever used an arithmetic mean, a Pearson correlation or a standard deviation to describe a dataset, I'm writing this for you. Better numbers exist to summarize location, association and spread: numbers that are easier to interpret and that don't act up with wonky data and outliers.
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An OCR cliche: Into his/her anus (2009)
In order to improve the quality of my transcription of the 1879 edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I collate the text against the Google Books version. Although the OCR is faulty, it is helpful fo…
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Traveling the World on a Third World Passport
Travel the world with a third-world passport: Embrace the unfairness and overcome limitations. Here's how I traveled the world with a Thai passport.
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Things I Learned from Five Years in Climate Tech
Articles about systems, programming, and software engineering management written by Evan Meagher
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Takkyu-bin: Luggage forwarding in Japan
Please don't roll your big bags around town
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What I Learned From Fixing my Laptop's Motherboard
A month ago I managed to break my laptop, by reversing the polarity of a universal power supply. The repair shop diagnosed the problem as a failed motherboard, and asked for €659 to replace it. I found the price preposterous and the notion of throwing away a motherboard for a single failed component ecologically…
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My next Mac might be the last
Why keep investing in a platform that's been disappointing me for a while?
1702
Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks
Tim Ferriss Intro Hundreds of people have asked me about Soylent, a controversial Silicon Valley team trying to replace food with a grayish liquid. “Does it really deliver all the nutrients the human body needs?” “Is it safe?” “Why hasn’t anyone tried this before?” [Hint: they have] And most often: “What do you think…
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Does creatine make you smarter?
And why does the brain use creatine anyway?
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Bird brains (2023)
A kea parrot in New Zealand learned to drag traffic cones onto a highway so cars would stop and humans would feed it. That sent me down a rabbit hole on how we actually measure bird intelligence.
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Build stuff
Extending on the about page, I want to emphasise even more the importance of creating personal projects, having independent work and going far beyond what a degree might teach you. Just so that we are on the same page, I will not take into consideration the reason for choosing a Computer Science degree, nor the money…
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Life in a Studio Apartment with My Wife and Two Sons
Between July 2011 and August 2015 I lived in a ~400sqft studio apartment in San Francisco. I moved in a bachelor but by the time I moved out, I was one member of a four person family. Here are some things I learned along the way. Lesson 1) Rent control has strange side effects San Francisco has a rent control policy…
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Why am I interested in Elixir?
I’ve had Elixir on the brain recently. And by recently I probably mean 2 years. In my defense I think it is fair to say it is blooming right now. I haven’t had much need of it, or opportunity for it, in my day-to-day of maintaining a Python legacy system, renewing another legacy or optimizing Elasticsearch. So I’ve…