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Critical Thinking Isn't Just a Process
Authoritarian muscle memory and the twists and turns of lying
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 640 posts.
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Difficult math is about recognizing patterns
Jeff Bezos tells a great story about the smartest guy he knew at Princeton. He and a classmate were working on a really tough partial differential equation and getting nowhere. They spent 3 hours on the problem and gave up.
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I almost quit caffeine in one year
A holding company for strategic investments
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How to Teach Math?
The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics—Paul Halmos Angie Hodge is an Associate Professor of mathematics at Northern Arizona University. Her interests as stated on her website …
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I’ve been reading a whole lot about tomatoes
Hello there, I'm betting that you need a break from curve flattening, and disinfectants, and Twitter, and Slack, and Zoom, and asking if people can see your...
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A writing tip I learned at Oxford
No, this is not an essay about commas
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The Reading Obsession
“I just sit in my office and read all day.” - Warren Buffett
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Two stories about tacit knowledge
To build a nuke or (can) not build a nuke
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Farmers always worked from home
Farmers effectively work from home, and in the past majority of the population was farming. What can they teach us about Work-Life Balance?
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Yes, experts will lie to you sometimes
Econ gives us an example of when and why this happens.
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There are infinite worlds to explore
There are infinite worlds to explore.
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My experiments with sprouting legumes
Recently, I have been on a ‘sprouting’ spree!! Why all this interest in sprouting suddenly? Remember my post on Moong Dal that proved sprouting reduces gas-forming and other anti-nutrients? That and the post on Iron absorption that proved sprouting makes it easier for you to assimilate Iron in your body? I mean, I…
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Walking the World: Bucharest
A city of the grandiose, filled with the humble
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The longest train journey in the world in 2021
IMPORTANT : this blog post is correct as of 15 December 2021, and all the text below is unchanged since then. At that time two borders - Russia to China, and China to Laos - could not be crossed due to COVID. The outbreak of war in Ukraine has also meant that trains
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Kill the Alarm Clock (2017)
Few upwardly mobile people in the modern rat-race society can live without an alarm clock. With a shot of strong coffee and round-the-clock stress, most people learn to live and survive with an alarm clock. Half of the population wakes up with an alarm, 9% are woken by a partner, 4% by pets, 3% by children, etc. That…
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Heating Water with Fire (2019)
Cook your food, warm your home AND heat your hot water?? Learn all about how thermosyphoning works, in a passive and continuous cycle. The ins-and-outs of pressure systems, water jackets, and all associated systems - including solar, radiators and underfloor heating!
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My “Investment Mindset”
The year was 2007. I was a college student attending a 24-hour hackathon where we had had to build something on top of live trucking data. We were given an API that sent GPS and other metadata for 100 trucks roaming across Europe, the data updating every five seconds.
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Sam Fussell: An interview with the author of Muscle (2014)
Michael J. Joyner, M.D. June 10, 2014 In 1991 Sam Fussell published the book “Muscle” about his experiences in body building. The book tells the story of how he went from being a good 6-4, 170 pound college soccer player to a committed body builder about 100 pounds heavier. It is perhaps the best
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My values, howled into the wind
I’m about to leave for a family vacation—our first such since before the pandemic, one planned and paid for literally the day before the news of Omicron broke. On the negative side, sta…
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Habits I've developed for fast and efficient programming
There's been a lot of discussion recently about working fast and being productive in software development, and I thought I'd share some of my own strategies that I've developed for that purpose.
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Adventures using and repairing an X131e laptop from 2011
This article covers several repairs, one including reverse engineering the BIOS to allow replacement parts. Feel free to scroll down and skip to this content.
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Reflections on E-Bikes
E-biking has made me rethink things about my city, cities in general, and mobility as a human need and right. Here are things that have struck me while learning to use (e)bikes for transportation.
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Learn about problems, not solutions
Sometimes people ask me what they should learn - they've heard AI is kind of hot, but DevOps is too? What's the best way to get into AI? Should they s