5491
Writing as a form of thinking
The cost of delegating the writing process to other entities (like LLMs)
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,937 posts.
5492
Writing Grant Applications
For two years I was on the Canadian NSERC committee that reviewed individual grant applications. Fascinating. After reading dozens of applications you can begin to see patterns emerging. I’m …
5493
Generative eBook Covers
Here at NYPL Labs we’re working on an ebook-borrowing and reading app. This post explores automated ways for creating covers for public-dom…
5494
5495
A Pixel Parable
An imagined town is at least as real as an actual town.
5496
So you want to abolish time zones
Laudable! Let's take a look at some of the changes that arise from this, through a simple case study: making an international phone call to a relative. Before abolishing time zones I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there? Google tells me it is currently...
5497
5498
Mars Problems vs. Venus Problems
Posted on Wednesday 23 Sep 2020. 825 words, 7 links. By Matt Webb.
5499
The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)
Cutting out the news has been one of the best lifestyle decisions I've made in recent years, second only to cutting out social media (though the two are not mutually exclusive). Reducing my intake of what is essentially junk information has significantly reduced anxiety and worry in my day to day life, and has freed…
5500
Everything will be alright in Iceland
On volcanoes, crises, and what we can learn from Icelanders
5501
Interview with Paul Graham
The fixed point of Y Combinator
5502
Read “Gravity’s Rainbow” fifty years later
Or, why you should read "Gravity’s Rainbow" fifty years later.
5503
“Multiple personality disorder” probably doesn't exist
TikTok culture can be incredibly toxic, but those on the left refuse to ever condemn it for fear of echoing conservatives
5504
5505
Intermittent fasting in mice improves long-term memory retention
Intermittent Fasting is an effective means of improving long term memory retention and generating new adult hippocampal neurons in mice
5506
Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous
Then Life Continued
5507
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.
5508
5509
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…
5510
Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work
When I make something good, I often spend most of my time making thousands of high-precision edits on an artifact that I thought should have been finished hours ago.
5511
5512
Hundred Year Mistakes
My manager and I got off on a tangent in our most recent one-on-one on the subject of the durability of design mistakes in programming languages. A particular favourite of mine is the worst of the …
5513
End of the conference era?
Chris Adamson notes a significant contraction in iOS and related conferences recently (via Michael Tsai ).
5514
5515
The regenerative urban garden I: No-till gardening
I am an advocate of regenerative farming . But I’m not a farmer myself. The piece of land I steward is 1/3 acre — still sizable for an urban lot, but laughably minuscule compared to what Real Farmers are working with.
5516
A first lesson in meta-rationality
A first lesson in meta-rationality, or stage 5 cognition, using Bongard problems as a laboratory.
5517
Why don't I have a blog?
I feel like I should have a blog. Specifically, a tech blog. Everything points towards it! I like coding, I like reading, I particularly like reading blog posts . So then, why don't I have one?!
5518
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...
5519
What I Learned Writing an Album in Just Intonation
Just intonation (JI) today falls under the umbrella of microtonal music, because it involves playing "between the notes" of the 12-tone scale we're used to. As I type microtonal , my spellchecker decorates it with a sad squiggle, confirming I've drifted (again) into a topic that's not even in its dictionary. But JI is…
5520
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.