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mRNA vaccines: let's eradicate herpes, cure cancer, and be sick a whole lot less
Quick, inexpensive, made-to-order treatments
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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 530 posts.
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Heart rate variability differs between smartwatch and clinical testing
At a time when usage of smartwatches and rings has become more common, a West Virginia University human performance researcher points out heart rate variability — the time between heartbeats — the devices report is different from what would be recorded in a clinical setting.
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Perfectionism is optimizing at the wrong scale
At the risk of stating the obvious even more obviously than I usually do: sometimes the perfect approach involves tolerating imperfection. Imperfection?! Yes. Specifically, the more macroscopic one’s view becomes, the more microscopic imperfections may need to be tolerated — if they don’t matter to the goal, or the
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The end of Pepper&Carrot and my next project
Hey, I feel like I'm at a big crossroads and this is an important blog post, but you probably already guessed that from the title.
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The Most Expensive Eating Disorder
Disclaimer: I have never personally met Bryan Johnson. Reading this again, I realized that this article is quite harsh at times. Overall, I do like him and I am grateful that someone like Bryan exists as he is propelling the whole field of longevity forward by making it more popular. I also like the way […]
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Documenting Dance: Keeping Score (2017)
At several points throughout history, someone has sat down to watch a ballet; a long and complex performance with multiple dancers and changes of music and style, and at the end of it, said: “someh…
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Ditch the sim rig and use your car instead (2019)
Use DIY CAN bus tools to convert your car into the best sim rig ever
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A dictionary of single-letter variable names
Haskell’s expressive type system means that type signatures can carry a lot of information. Haskell’s polymorphism means that you sometimes write functions that work across an enormous range of types, and are left wondering “what do I actually call my variables?”. It is often the case that there’s nothing to say…
490
Dropbox keeps threatening to delete my files
For the past two years, I’ve been on the receiving end of a passive aggressive win-back campaign from Dropbox. The feud originally started when I migrated away from Dropbox and hence canceled my subscription while leaving them saddled with over a terabyte of my data to carry forever, like a camel in the digital…
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How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)
First we discussed the fact that technical issues cause remote meetings to suck. Then, we discussed how even when there are no technical issues, remote meetings still suck. They suck because they e…
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Becoming physically immune to brute-force attacks (2021)
Using thermal physics, cosmology, and computer science to calculate password vulnerability to the biggest possible brute-force attack.
493
Sorry, wrong number
Road numbering is a system with clear rules. What happens when the people responsible for numbering roads don't follow them?
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Measuring personal growth
My founder friends constantly think about growth. They think about how to measure their business growth and how to get to the next order of magnitude scale. If they’re making $1M ARR today, they think about how to get to $10M ARR. If they have 1,000 users today, they think about how to get to 10,000 users.
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Don't bet on the joys of pokies (2011)
When I was working in the Cairns Casino I’d often arrive on the floor to replace a guy who had been in the industry as long as casinos had b...
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The fresh start effect
I spent nearly five years working at the nutrition startup Lifesum in Stockholm, where we built a mobile app for tracking your diet and exercise.
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Why don't schools teach debugging, or, more fundamentally, fundamentals?
If you find this piece worthwhile, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding ongoing cancer care. A story from Dan Luu, from back when he “TA’ed EE 202, a second year class on signals and systems at P…
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Don't store your cucumbers in the fridge (2012)
Image courtesy of UC Davis. Photographer: Don EdwardsJust in time for cucumber season, some news that surprises me. Did you know that you should store cucumbers at room temperature?Credit for my enlightenment goes to UC Davis.
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Thoughts on the Resiliency of Web Projects
I just did a massive spring cleaning of one of my servers, trying to clean up what has become quite the mess of clutter. For every website on the server, I either:
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An Interview with Robert Caro and Kurt Vonnegut (1999)
Kurt greeted us in his beautiful 19th century house and in his bare feet (of which more later). As the interview progressed it grew sort of
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Gratitude despite the odds
Joseph Brodsky, on being grateful
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Things I Learned from René Girard
How a thinker who hated trends & fashions became trendy & fashionable
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Mustard
I love hot dogs and I'm from Chicago so we knew this was coming
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My weekend project turned into a 3 year journey
I'm creating an app that started as a simple note-taking tool but has now grown into a full-fledged project way beyond what I could have imagined. Let me tell…
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David Kahn has died
David Kahn has died. His groundbreaking book, The Codebreakers, was the first serious book I read about codebreaking, and one of the primary reasons I entered this field. He will be missed. EDITED TO ADD (2/4): Funeral website. EDITED TO ADD (2/10): New York Times obituary.
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Got my ultimate retro KVM setup working
By Ruben Schade in Eora/Sydney, Australia.
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Is "Rich Dad Poor Dad" a Fraud?
With my interest in personal finance, the headline Robert Kiyosaki, ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’ Author, Says, ‘I Am a Billionaire in Debt’ — And Calls Dave Ramsey An Idiot For Encou…