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Obvious to you. Amazing to others.
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.
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,934 posts.
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How I Build
My idea of a vacation might be weird to some. Sure, I like sunshine, I like beaches – but more than all that, I like making stuff with computers.
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Rest In Peace, John. I was lucky to know you so deeply
I met John Paragon, Jambi the genie on Pee-wee’s Playhouse, at the improvisational comedy group The Groundlings, where both our careers started. He was sly and wickedly funny. We became best friends instantly. In a group of exceptionally talented and […]
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Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone photos
I noted here, I believe, that recently my dSLR, my Nikon d750, basically crapped itself, most likely from a faulty mirror mechanism. This wasn’t entirely a surprise to me — it had devel…
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What a year of solar and batteries saved us in 2025
Throughout 2025, I spoke a few times about our home energy solution, including our grid usage, our solar array and our Tesla Powerwall batteries. Now that I have a full year of data, I wanted to take a look at exactly how everything is working out, and, in alignment with
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He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice
Ask ChatGPT to estimate the carbs in your lunch. Now ask it again. And again. Five hundred times. You’d expect the same answer each time. It’s the same photo, the same model, the same question. But you won’t get the same answer. Not even close — and the differences are large enough to cause a
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Your Move, iPad
Hear that? It’s the sound of Mac fans. No, not your shiny new M1 Mac’s fans—chances are, you’ll never hear those—but rather, the sound of excitement rippling through the Mac community. This is something big. Really big. Now, I’m only 33, but someday when I go full fuddy-duddy I will speak of this: the great…
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Dunning-Kruger and other memes (2015)
It's really common to see claims that some meme is backed by “studies” or “science”. But when I look at the actual studies, it usually turns out that the data are opposed to the claim. Here are the last few instances of this that I've run across.
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Nobody optimizes happiness
People don’t seem to try very hard to make themselves happier. Why not?
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How to travel around the world for a year
While my last post covered my previous year traveling, writing and programming [http://old.alexmaccaw.com/posts/traveling_writing_programming], this article will go into the specifics of planning your own round the world trip, including flights, costs, activities and accommodation. I'll show you how affordable…
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Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper
The scientific reason, explained
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On being ready to die, and yet also now being able to swallow ice cream
Part of being ready to die comes, I think, from psychedelics; I wrote in “How do we evaluate our lives, at the end? What counts, what matters?”: “Bess (my wife) and psychedelics taught me to …
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Why every programmer should have a Tiddlywiki
Why every programmer should have a Tiddlywiki A year ago, my good friend Casey Watson suggested that I try using a per...
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The art and science of spending money
Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch once nearly died of a heart attack.
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A peek inside Japan's largest “Dagashi” store
Every morning, 67-year Hideyuki Akiyama drives to his store along the rural roads of Okayama in Western Japan. Today is no different. A line of excited customers queuing up before the shutters are open. “Disneyland isn’t our land of dreams, this is!” says one 20-something woman. “This”
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How I Teach Classes Remotely
Technology, running tech companies, data science, religion, translation technology, natural language processing, backups, p-adic linguistics, academia
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Analyzing HN readers' personal blogs
Analyzing the little guys
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When 70M people visit your joke site
What happens when 70 million people visit your joke site?
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A Lament for Aperture
I'm an old Mac-head at heart, and I've been using Macs since the mid 1990s (the first Mac I used was an LC II with System 7.1 installed on it). I don't tend to think that the computing experience was better in the olden days — sure, there's a thing to be said about the simplicity of older software, but most of my…
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Introduction to Reinforcement Learning (2015)
Build AI responsibly to benefit humanity
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Are any words the same in all languages?
Languages can be so different from each other—but there are a few words nearly all languages have in common! Can you guess which ones?
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Eating stinging nettles
Spring is here and the nettles are growing again so I decided it was time to make a meal out of them. Most people know that stinging nettles are pesky green plants that irritate the skin when you t…
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