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Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 465 posts.
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Graying Out
For many years I’ve interacted with my fellow humans, I think perhaps more than any other way, via the medium of Internet chat. But in my chat window, they’re fading, one by one. This problem is technical and personal and I felt it ought not to go unrecognized.
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Consume less, create more
Modern technology makes us consumers instead of creators
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MacBook Pro Keyboard Drives Me Crazy
The 2018 MacBook Pro Keyboard Drives Me Crazy
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The Hand Licking Incident
When my oldest son was seven and in second grade, we were living in Kansas. Some time after the school year started, he began licking his ha...
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Saving Lydia
My 6 month old daughter was born with a genetic mutation that will leave her severely disabled. We can silence her mutation within months…
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Every productivity thought I've ever had, as concisely as possible
I combed through several years of my private notes and through everything I published on productivity before and tried to summarize all of it in this post. If you’re unproductive right now Here’s what you should do if you’ve been procrastinating for an entire day: Accept that you won’t do anything today and try not to…
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Making My Own Glasses
A biohacking health story about making custom glasses after conflicting eye test results from two opticians and an eye doctor for a pilot’s license exam.
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Preserving Laptop Stickers on MacBooks
This is now a thing! Here is the follow-up post, containing the details. Join the Kickstarter here! Even better news, this is now not just a thing, but an actual physical product! Please check out LidLayer.com Preface I’ve always liked the idea of putting stickers on my MacBook Pro, but have always avoided it for two…
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Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them
This article has been translated into Spanish: Por qué debes aprender más lenguajes de programación (incluso si no los vas a utilizar)
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Daydreaming about the future instead of doing work today
I have a friend who’s creating an awesome side project: LED signs that you can control to let your coworkers know you’re busy.…
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How to Draw Animals (1930)
Les Animaux tels qu'ils sont par R. et L. Lambry sur le site de l' Agence Eureka (cliquez sur les images pour les agrandir) ...
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What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?
This article will give you a list of the most valuable things you can learn in just an hour. There are many basic and valuable skills you can acquire in a very short amount of time, not only in technology but also in general life. Cooking, first aid & CPR, setting up a Raspberry Pi, cable management, or even learning…
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On whether changes in bedroom CO2 levels affect sleep quality
Self-experiment on whether changes in bedroom CO₂ levels affect sleep quality
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Focus has become more valuable than intelligence (2018)
This may be the most important problem of our lifetime.
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A three-page paper that shook philosophy, with lessons for software engineers
In 1963, the philosopher Edmund Gettier published a three-page paper in the journal Analysis that quickly became a classic in the field. Epistemologists going back to the Greeks had debated what it meant to know something, and in the Enlightenment, a definition was settled upon: to know something is to have a…
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Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated
Most people have an extremely incorrect perception about waste disposal and recycling. Here’s the reality.
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How to parent more predictably (2018)
(As with anything else I write about parenting, this is mostly just my observations with my own two kids and may not generalize as well as I think it does.) A few weeks ago I wrote about why I think it's valuable for parents to be predictable. I was mostly describing an end state, though, and reasons why it's a good…
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Procrastination is not a time management problem, it is an emotion
We procrastinate because of poor emotion regulation. Instead of addressing the anxiety associated with completing the task and then doing it, we engage in pleasurable tasks to delay the anxiety. This piles up when motivation kicks in and conflicts us. Here are scientific solutions to overcome procrastination.
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Bye, Bye, Google
I spent this past weekend de-Google-ifying my life and, despite my expectations, it wasn't too hard to do.
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Coolest Things I Learned in 2018
David shares the coolest things he learned in 2018. Read here.
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I'm not burned out, I'm pissed off
(Hey HN/Reddit/Lobste.rs! I didn't expect this to take off, there are a couple of unclear things in here. The biggest seeming to be my ha...
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Writing Is Thinking: Learning to Write with Confidence
Learning to write is learning to think, because writing is thinking. They are two peas in a powerful pod. This article goes over my writing process, focused on minimizing the activation energy to get started.
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Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)
Applied Computer Science: On Murder Considered As STEM Field—using information theory to quantify the magnitude of Light Yagami’s mistakes in 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡𝘩 𝑁𝑜𝑡𝑒 and considering fixes
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Time anxiety: is it too late?
I have always struggled with a thought: it’s too late. Too late to publish a book, to start a company, to learn a new language. This is called time anxiety.
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Self-distancing can help you make better decisions
It’s hard to set your emotions aside when you’re faced with a difficult decision. This is problematic, since our emotions often cause us to make the wrong decision in important areas of life, including in our relationships, our finances, and our health.