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Reading with a pencil
The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book. —George Steiner
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 282 posts.
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Book Review: Twelve Rules for Life
I. I got Jordan Peterson’s Twelve Rules For Life for the same reason as the other 210,000 people: to make fun of the lobster thing. Or if not the lobster thing, then the neo-Marxism thing, or…
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On Loneliness and Solitude
I discovered the existence of Lars Svendsen thanks to a forum discussion about - of all things - the modern apparel industry. One of the comments mentioned in passing his "Fashion: A Philosophy" and the idea of someone writing a philosophical analysis of Fashion intrigued me… so I checked out the book on Amazon. In…
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The Spacing Effect: How to Improve Learning and Maximize Retention
We are not taught how to learn in school, we are taught how to pass tests. The spacing effect is a far more effective way to learn and retain information that works with our brain instead of against it. Find out how to use it here.
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Coherence Penalty for Humans
This is a brief aside from my ongoing series about avoiding entity services. An interesting dinner conversation led to thoughts that I needed to write down. Amdahl's Law In 1967, Gene Amdahl presented a case against multiprocessing computers. He argued that the maximum speed increase for a task would be limited…
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Foundations of ML and AI: Book recommendations
Here's what I recommend to programmers if they want to understand machine learning. Six fantastic books that you can work with in your spare time to build yo...
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Don’t Know What to Do with Your Life? Seek Bargains (2012)
A Career Crossroads In the early winter of 2004, I was a senior at Dartmouth College and in the fortunate position of having two good ... Read more
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The Unhealthy Desire for Prestige
There is an unhealthy desire for prestige and money that is ruining people's lives. At the end of all the striving, you might end up feeling empty inside. The desire for prestige and money is why we: 1) spend an outrageous sum of money on education despite it being free, 2) kill ourselves at jobs we
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Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)
[Another submission from a former postdoc at one of the top ten universities in the U.S. The e-mail came to me as follows: "I read your b...
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Printing and binding your own books and manuals (2003)
Despite the wealth of on-screen documentation available, like many people I still feel the need to print things out for reference or study. For most people, printing out a manual means putting up with a bunch of A4 or Letter-sized pages with a staple through the corner, which doesn't seem much good to me. Instead I…
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Things I did wrong as a professor (2016)
I really screwed things up as a young faculty member at Harvard. It worked out OK in the end, but, man, I wish I could go back in time to w...
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Worst Puzzle Ever (2009)
It breaks my heart to write this post because the puzzle in question was 1) very expensive and 2) given to me by someone very dear to me who...
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Tracking where your time went with Lego workstream visualisation
Software development blog of Joe Wright
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A Love Letter to Plain Text
I have used Hugo, the blog engine this blog runs on top of, more and more lately for less and less typical use cases. Hopefully this post will inspire others in similar ways.
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How to read an RFC
For better or worse, Requests for Comments (RFCs) are how we specify many protocols on the Internet. These documents are alternatively treated as holy texts by developers who parse them for hidden meanings, then shunned as irrelevant because they can’t be understood. This often leads to frustration and – more…
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A tale of 132 e's
A few weeks ago my most popular repository on GitHub was crowbar , a Rust crate that I’m particularly proud of. It wasn’t necessarily good , but it did something interesting. It has 168 stars.
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Judge the value of what you have by what you had to give up to get it
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 6 April 2018. I’m not one to collect inspirational slogans, but here’s one I like: “Judge the value of what you have by what you had to giv…
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Flocking
Have you ever watched a school of fish, a flock of birds, or even a crowd of people and watched how they move?
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Why read old philosophy?
I’m going to try to explain a mystery that puzzled me for years. This answer finally dawned on me in the middle of one of those occasional conversations in which non-perplexed friends patiently try…
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Unquantified
The only real valuable thing is intuition. – Albert Einstein A year ago I got rid of my scale, a simple act that turned out to be the catalyst for a year’s worth of quiet introspection and experimentation in removing quantification from my life. A year later I’m quantifiably more ignorant about myself than I have been…