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My New Favorite Tool for Reviewing PDFs: Okular
Harris Kenny, founder of OutboundSync. A little ode to a computing journey.
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 382 posts.
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Low-quality sleep can lead to procrastination
New research that was recently published in Frontiers in Psychology provides important insights regarding the connection between sleep quality and the tendency to procrastinate .
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Tracking Blood Sugar
Fasting glucose and A1C tests done over the past few years show me at low risk for diabetes. But these tests don’t necessarily capture how much blood sugar “spikes” after meals–something that may be a better predictor of disease risk . Such blood sugar spikes can be minimized with a suitable diet, but what that diet…
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Everything You Should Know About Sound (2016)
We all know what sound is. Except actually, no we don't. Let's fix that.
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Misunderstanding Dunning-Kruger
There is, apparently, an increase recently in interest in the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Washington Post writes about this recently, making the obvious political observation (having to do with the current occupant of the White House). It's great that there is public interest in an important psychological phenomenon…
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Scott Alexander Reviews Thiel's Zero to One
I. Zero To One might be the first best-selling business book based on a Tumblr. Stanford student Blake Masters took Peter Thiel’s class on startups. He posted his notes on Tumblr after each l…
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Travels with a Pi (2018)
Pete's Random Notes Blog - I have opinions on lots of things...
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My OpenStreetMap Workflow: Mapping the Village of Marmari, Evia
A general OpenStreetMap editing workflow, with the example of Mapping the village of Marmari, Evia in Greece (Μαρμάρι, Εύβοια).
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A Good Year for “A Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics”
A year ago today I self-published “A Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics” (PIM). In this short note I want to describe the success it’s had, summarize the complaints of some readers and the praise of others, and outline what’s next. Since publication PIM has sold over 11,000 copies. A rough chart showing the…
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Thoughts On a Year of Exercise
A year ago today, weighing nearly 200 pounds and feeling physically run down, and also feeling somewhat depressed about those facts, I hauled my carcass up on the treadmill we have in our basement …
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Normalization of Deviance
If I was setting up curriculum at a university I’d make an entire semester-long class on The Challenger disaster, and make it required for any remotely STEM-oriented major. Because I think it…
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The Best Magazine Articles Ever (2012)
The following are suggestions for the best magazine articles (in English) ever. Stars denote how many times a correspondent has suggested it. Submitter comments are in italics. For a great way to read long-form magazine articles on a tablet device see my review of LongForm and Instapaper here .
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Fancy Believing in the Goblin King (2017)
Two winters ago I was told a story by a friend of mine. A true story, about an episode from his childhood he’d never mentioned befor...
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How to Begin a Novel
Last year for National Novel Writing Month I trained a neural net called torch-rnn on 10,096 unique ways to begin a novel. It came up with some intriguing possibilities, my personal favorite being “I am forced to write to my neighbors about the beast.” But many of its sentences used made-up words, or had such weird…
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Interslavic Language
Introduction to Interslavic — Vvod v medžuslovjansky jeazy — Ввод в меджусловјански језык
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Life is fractal, but markets are square
I recently read Venkat’s synopsis of the book Seeing like a state, which I followed up by an excellent blog post titled The Meridian of Her Greatness. Venkat challenged people to summarize the most important ideas from that post in a tweetstorm. He said if it gets more than 100 likes, on Twitter he’ll give… Read More
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Writing a Technical Book for Manning
If you've ever thought of publishing a tech book then read up on my experiences writing HTTP/2 in Action for Manning.
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Preparing for Prison (2016)
I’ve written previously about various aspects of imprisonment, including practical preparations such as packing your personal possessions (r...
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Lessons learned: writing really long fiction
So, about a decade ago I wrote an essay on this blog about the writing of the Merchant Princes series (at that point, six slim novels—the Empire Games follow-on trilogy wasn't more than a daydream back then), in which I tried to pin down what I'd learned about writing a series.
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How and why I transitioned to Linux, and how you can too
First published Jan. 17, 2019; updated Nov. 15, 2019 Let me briefly tell my Linux story. If you're thinking about moving to Linux, and wondering how you'd do so, it might give you some pointers and inspiration. The back story My first introduction to the command line was in the 80s when I f
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German expressions that don’t exist in English
The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” I wonder if he would have said so if his native language wasn’t German. Whether one agrees with it or not (I personally would do so partially!), there’s some modern neuroscience that backs important portions…
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The Guide to Writing Online
Think better. Grow your audience. Accelerate your career.