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Steelmanning: Discover the truth by helping your opponent
Tackle the steelmanning challenge, a three-step method to win arguments by helping your opponent. Its only downside: Nobody will ever take it.
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 816 posts.
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Algorithms to Live By – The Computer Science of Human Decisions
What does the math tell us about how many job applicants we should look at before hiring one? While onboarding our new employees, how can ideas from the TCP networking protocol help us to identify the optimal workload for them? Why would giving employees unlimited vacation days most likely lead to less vacation being…
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Ceiling Air Purifier
Imagine a high-capacity air filter that is extremely quiet and doesn't get in the way. I think I see how to build one; here's a prototype: By putting a fan on the ceiling you can have very long blades. This is important for keeping noise down: the longer your blades are the more air you move at a given rotational…
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My First 80 Days of VR for Exercise
Three months ago, during my first Think Week, I realized that consistently working out would meaningfully improve my long term health and happiness.
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Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health
Controlling lighting is an extremely powerful force on your daily life satisfaction
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How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself (2014)
“These days, you see a kid lying on his back and looking blank and you begin to wonder what’s wrong with him. There’s nothing wrong with him, except he’s thinking… He is trying to arriv…
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Things I learnt doing stand-up comedy
Coming on Stage for my Set. From March to April 2022 I took part in a 6 week stand-up comedy course for beginners at The Comedy St...
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Reasons to tour by bicycle
I recommend a long bicycle tour as one of the best ways to see parts of the world, especially America. There was an article in a recent New York Times about 8 great bike touring routes in the US. These … Continue reading →
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My experience writing and selling a short story
An anecdotal account of my experience writing and selling "India World" to Tor.com
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One in three young people say they felt happier during lockdown
One in three young people say their mental health and wellbeing improved during COVID-19 lockdown measures, with potential contributing factors including feeling less lonely, avoiding bullying and getting more sleep and exercise, according to researchers at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford.
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Things I don’t want to do to grow my side project
Life is to short to work on things you hate
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Let's make the web personal again
As we're building Nym , an open-source spiritual successor to Blogger & Wordpress, we'd like to revisit the ideas of our forebears whose ideas have paved the path for us to build the next generation of personal website & blogging software on.
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25+ years of personal knowledge management
In this post, I describe my entire Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system and its evolution over 25+ years
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A few things I’ve learned about livestreaming
“Thanks” to the pandemic, I’ve spent much more time figuring out how to deal with video and live streaming than I ever thought I would. It’s turned out to be a surprisingly rewarding experience. In no particular order, here are some things I’ve learned along the way.
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I'm quitting my PhD
Just a bit over half a year ago, I started my PhD in Quantum Computing. Even though I basically didn’t have any previous knowledge about it, I thought Quantum Computing was an interesting challenge to get into. What should I say? Quantum Computing is really cool, indeed! Having a background in Theoretical Informatics…
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What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)
As part of my job I spend quite a lot of time scanning through files and disk contents, often in hex or filtered text view, searching for sp...
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Surviving the front page of Hacker News on a 50 Mbps uplink
Overview of basic analytics during that one time my blog post got traction on HackerNews, and the steps I took to prepare for just this occasion.
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Down the mechanical keyboard rabbit hole
I’m writing this to share my experience adapting to weird keyboards and layouts.
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The appeal of using plain HTML pages (2019)
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Sleeping longer than 6.5 hours/day can help you lose weight: study
According to a recent study, sleeping an extra hour could help you lose weight if you're not sleeping enough to begin with