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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 669 posts.
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I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience
The current Threads experience
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“The Famous F40” Vector Illustration
I was looking through some old Macintosh CD-ROMs, searching for my usual things that I do whenever I add new discs to my collection: hanafuda, specific artis...
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We don’t trade with ants
When discussing advanced AI, sometimes the following exchanges happens: “Perhaps advanced AI won’t kill us. Perhaps it will trade with us” “We don’t trade with ants” I think it’s interesting to get clear on exactly why we don’t trade with ants, and whether it is relevant to the AI situation. When a person says “we…
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Tabi: The shoe that became a sock and then a shoe again
Stockholm, 1912 At 35° C it was an unusually hot day for Stockholm. Shizo Kanakuri stood at the start line of the marathon in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Shizo was carrying the hopes, dreams, and pride of Japan, a country attempting to become a “modern” nation. There was something that
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Usability of Old Computers
I set up a Retro PC recently. One of the reasons I did this is because I was inspired by this thread:
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Money is the megaphone of identity (2020)
If you don’t give money its purpose, it will end up defining yours.
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More people should write (2012)
More people should do what I’m doing right now. They should sit at their computers and bat the cursor around — write full sentences about themselves and the things they care about.
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Writing as a form of thinking
The cost of delegating the writing process to other entities (like LLMs)
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Read “Gravity’s Rainbow” fifty years later
Or, why you should read "Gravity’s Rainbow" fifty years later.
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Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous
Then Life Continued
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Don’t record your social life on an append-only social network (2022)
The tech behind peer-to-peer (P2P) social networks such as Secure Scuttlebutt enforces permanency. Absolute permanency isn’t what you want in a social network.
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The Maddest My Code Made Anyone
I was lucky enough to grow up through the early 2000’s, during the golden age of Half-Life mods. Industry classics like Counter-Strike (CS) had just been invented, every month brought new mods to try, and files were too big to download on a dial-up connection so you’d leech them off a server at a big local LAN party…
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Just Write
I listened to a podcast about Lena Dunham. I knew nothing about her, had never seen any of her work, and probably never will. But the episode ended with thes...
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Using computers more freely and safely
The most important step is the first one. Humanity didn't get good at building houses by building the same house a million times. We built lots of different houses and learned from each other's failures. Gravitating away from monopolies is a way everyone can help improve software, regardless of our abilities or needs.
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Book Review: The Laws of Trading
Finalist #10 in the Book Review Contest
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I've mostly stopped reading technical mailing lists
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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I Can't Sleep
I can't sleep. I'm lying in bed every night, and images of Gaza are running through my head. Fathers holding their babies, dead, caked in dust. Bombs dropped on homes [1], on hospitals [2], on schools [3]. Tens of thousands of dead [4] in indiscriminate bombings [5]. Children
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Waterloo Style
A blog about software development and programming.
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How to reduce stress and overcome anxiety as a software developer
I share my story about stress and anxiety and how I managed to overcome it. I also share practical tips and resources that will help you begin your healing journey today!
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Why write?
As a reaction to the previous article on how to write a scientific paper, I got some reactions from friends and colleagues, the underlying message being that they would rather like to understand why writing can be important. There is indeed a tendency to see academic writing as a tedious task that one should try to…
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Understanding people matters more than understanding tech
Dear new developer, I ran across this tweet a while ago: If there was only one piece of advice that I wish I had known early in my career as a software dev is that understanding people is more impo…
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How to Beat Stress and Anxiety
Why do we feel stressed and what to do to calm down before an important event (managing anxiety, worry, and stress)
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'Terminator' 1 and 2 Save Their Reveals for the Right Time
And Other Thoughts on James Cameron's Classic
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The longest straight line in Great Britain without crossing a public road
In short, I believe I've found a longer straight line without crossing a public road than the line identified by Ordnance Survey in 2019. Im...
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Role-playing with AI will be a powerful tool for writers and educators
Or, how well can GPT-4 simulate an acid trip in 1963?
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Lessons Learned from the Book “Effective Remote Work”
Lessons Learned from the Book Effective Remote Work by James Stanier
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Having a game I'm into makes every day enjoyable
About a month ago, I became hooked on mahjong, the ultimate game. It’s a bit late in my life to start, but that’s how it is. In the past, I might have thought, “Playing games like this would be ruinous, leading to personal downfall.” But now, as I’ve grown older, I’ve stopped worrying about these