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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,935 posts.
Spaced repetition for study and learning
Efficient memorization using the spacing effect: literature review of widespread applicability, tips on use & what it’s good for.
Five Kinds of Friends (2022)
The word “friends” has at least five different meanings: Allies Backstage intimates Fun friends Mutual interests friends Soc...
Curl is just the hobby
Jan Gampe took things to the next level by actually making this cross-stitch out of the pattern I previously posted online. The flowers really gave it an extra level of charm I think. As a cross-stitch As a pillow This quote is from a comment by an upset user on my blog, replying to one … Continue reading curl is just…
My sourdough starter has twins
A couple of years ago, I participated in a study of the HealthFerm Citizen Science group in …
Incredible Secret Money Machine
When I first started to get serious about making money I ran into this book written in 1978 by a hippy-hacker living in Arizona. His advice was aimed at “craft and technical” types who wanted to create a small business “doing their thing” whether that was creating ceramic pots, designing outdoor gear, or writing…
Engage your audience: get to the point, use story structure, force specificity
I came across this recent video from Vicky Zhao last week and loved her brief summary of how she grew in her ability to clearly articulate ideas on the spot by getting to the point, using story str…
Cancer Progress: Much More Than You Wanted To Know (2018)
Official statistics say we are winning the War on Cancer. Cancer incidence rates, mortality rates, and five-year-survival rates have generally been moving in the right direction over the past few d…
The Pragmatic Programmer: 20th Anniversary Edition (2023)
A review of the 20th anniversary edition of The Pragmatic Programmer, updated for modern software development.
How to be consistent
A number of students have asked me for strategies to 'stay consistent'. I assume they are referring to their study routines, not CAP consistency, otherwise this would be a very different article! I do feel like I can give some suggestions, but first allow me to talk about Omar.
Anxiety as an algorithm
Founder, Investor, Author
Start Something Small
The other day I was listening to Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and and I found it amazing how this book, which has now sold over 15 million copies, originally started:
Learning Online
That we’ll learn school-ish things on the internet seems inevitable, but most people seem not to learn very much or very quickly online; Sebastian Thrun admitted as much in a Fast Company interview a few months ago. To figure out how computers actually could help people learn, I spent the summer teaching students and…
10 Years of Pomological Watercolors
A decade ago today I published a blog post calling for the US government to release its paintings of fruits. The Pomological Watercolor Collection, as I had recently come to know, is a beautiful and remarkable corpus of over 7,000 pictures of fruits and other biological specimens, made between the 1880s and 1940s…
Kaggle Learn review: there is a deep learning track and it is worth your time
Right from my undergrad days when I was starting out with machine learning to this date, my admiration for Kaggle continues to grow. In addition to being synonymous with and popularizing data scien…
How I Left YouTube
What was the road like when I left?
Leo Tolstoy on why people drink (2014)
“The seeing, spiritual being, whose manifestation we commonly call conscience, always points with one end towards right and with the other towards wrong, and we do not notice it while we foll…
Quit Social Media (2016)
Anti-Social Grumblings I recently gave a deliberatively provocative TEDx talk titled “quit social media” (see the video above). The theme of the event was “visions ... Read more
Is "colorectal cancer" rising in "young people"?
(Yes, but.)
Don't use your phone while you poop
Your brain needs to offload just as badly as your butt does. I know it sounds boring to sit in there, alone, naked from the waist down, staring at the wal...
Computer work lying down comfortably with a home-made stand over the bed
This article reports the result of a successful personal attempt to find an arrangement of keyboard, mouse and monitor for lying down comfortably while using a computer. It describes the arrangement and reports experiences using it. It does not discuss general motivations for working lying down.
Plagiarized in a plagiarism atonement essay
News broke this morning that upcoming author Jumi Bello plagiarized from Plagiarism Today when drafting a plagiarism explainer essay.
LLM Daydreaming
Proposal & discussion of how default mode networks for LLMs are an example of missing capabilities for search and novelty in contemporary AI systems.