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The truth is always made of details
If you were instructed to draw a leaf, you might draw a green, vaguely eye-shaped thing with a stem. But when you study a real leaf, say an elm leaf, it’s got much more g...
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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,937 posts.
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The theory of infectious origin of the Alzheimer’s disease
The theory of infectious origin of the Alzheimer's disease The hypothesis that Alzheimer's disease has an infectious origin, has a long and
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Feynman's wobbling plate: how to recover from burnout
So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance…
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Coding, Fast and Slow: Developers and the Psychology of Overconfidence (2013)
I’m going to talk today about what goes on in inside developers’ heads when they make estimates, why that’s so hard to fix, and how I personally figured out how to live and write software (for very happy business owners) even though my estimates are just as brutally unreliable as ever.
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Launching a product in just 3652 days
A story about how I learned a lot of things the hard way
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MUNI Heritage Weekend in San Francisco
I went to San Francisco for Muni Heritage Weekend 2026! I stood by the tracks for three hours with my line scan camera, scanning trams.
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How Japanese Dried Bonito Is Made
This workshop founded in 1882 still makes dried bonito like they did back in the Edo period. How katsuobushi — Japanese dried bonito, said to be the world’s har
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The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
Interruptions, recovery time, and task size: three numbers that determine if you'll get real work done. Interactive visualizations show the math behind bad days.
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Emotional Blocks as Obstacles to Learning
My goal was to come up with a system for reading a book. I eventually identified that as the wrong goal, but came up with a pretty great system for doing the much better goal of “how do I answer a …
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Early Days on Street View
A friend was asking about the early Street View timeline, which prompted a trip down memory lane. It's been at least five years for most of...
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Please don't be spooky
A piece of advice I wish I could give my manager is don't be spooky. My manager regularly messages me things like Hey, can you talk? or Got a minute now? ...
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Multitasking Doesn't Work
When we think we’re multitasking, most often we aren’t really doing two things at once, but instead, individual actions in rapid succession.
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The beauty of finished software
Let me introduce you to WordStar 4.0, a popular word processor from the early 80s. WordStar 4.0 As old as it seems, George R.R. Martin used it to write “A Song of Ice and Fire”. Why would someone use such an old piece of software to write over 5,000 pages? I love how he puts it: It does everything I want a word…
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How Does Esperanto Sound?
When people hear Esperanto for the first time, they sometimes think they're hearing Italian, or maybe Spanish. A good amount of vocabulary in Esperanto is taken from romance roots, so this isn't totally surprising.
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The Price of Discipline
David shares how discipline can lead to unhappiness and stifle learning for both children and adults. Read now.
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What I’m Teaching my Son about Money
I’m not going to lie to you – being wealthy is a lot of fun. And I’m not just talking about novelty fun that you get from driving around in a fancy car. True wealth is more of a b…
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Why introductory chemistry is boring: a long-term historical perspective
Looking for flashcards for chemistry? Try 21st Night ! It allows you to create and share flashcards with anything on them: images, videos, equations, you name it . Plus, there’s a built-in to-do list!
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How I lost control of our bank accounts to a phone scammer
Yesterday, instead of having a productive afternoon at home, I had the privilege of sitting at the bank for a couple of hours, resolving a problem completely of my own doing: I fell for a phone scammer. My wife and I had to close our accounts—which were in excess of 25 years old—and set up new ones. I then spent hours…
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Where we're going, we don't need headphones
If there is one single complaint about work I hear most often from clients and friends, it’s that they have a hard time focusing in their office. No matter if you’re pairing with someone or need some quiet time - if you can’t escape the background noise, you’ll have a hard time getting any work done. Let me share with…
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Stop trying to ‘be original’ and be prolific instead (2016)
Writing productivity courses and coaching programmes from the authors of Written: How to Keep Writing and Build a Habit that Lasts
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Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
I decided to leave what had been a promising career in organic chemistry about a year ago. Deciding to leave my program, and then to leave the field entirely, was one of the hardest decisions I hav…
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Email Isn’t the Thing We’re Bad At
You and me, we’re bad at a lot of things. But email isn’t one of those things, no matter how much it seems like it.
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Getting too absorbed in side projects
Does anyone else get too absorbed in side projects that you forget about life
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Why 'Atomic Habits' may not be working for you
Couple of weeks ago, we were discussing random things at work, and we landed on the topic of discipline. One of my colleagues was praising me for having a very disciplined life. It felt as if he was talking about someone else.
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