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Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol
When we finished the Potato Diet Community Trial, we found ourselves in a pickle. The diet worked — people lost 10.6 lbs on average over only four weeks — and we had basically no idea why. No idea …
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 669 posts.
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You just gotta tell a good story
I’ve been studying storytelling for my whole adult life. Theatre, Film, Writing, Digital.. you name it, I’ve studied it. ( Literally I have…
573
Preparing for missions in difficult places
Can I bring my emotional support dog?
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Laniakea Books: Public domain books for everyone
Laniakea Books is a publishing house in London, England, which publishes public domain books only.
575
Kathleen Sully, the Vanished Novelist (2022)
‘NOVELIST LECTURER VANISHES’ announced a headline in The Sheffield Telegraph on Wednesday, June 26, 1963. ‘What has happened to Kathleen Sully, the writer who should have arrived in Sheffield yesterday to lecture at the Sheffield Arts Festival?’ the reporter asked. Sully, then at the height of her career, had been…
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When feedback is not a gift
Feedback is the lifeblood of getting better, but be careful who you accept feedback from.
578
What I learned using private LLMs to write an undergraduate history essay
I used private and public LLMs to answer an undergraduate essay question I spent a week working on nearly 30 years ago, in an effort to see how the experience would have changed in that time. There were two rules:
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You can't reach the brain through the ears
Why do we have to learn everything the hard way?
580
How to Grow a Three Sisters Garden (2016)
By Melissa Kruse-Peeples For many Native American communities, three seeds - corn, beans, and squash represent the most important crops. When planted together, the Three Sisters, work together to help one another thrive and survive. Utilizing corn, beans, and squash together in your garden draws upon centuries of…
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Jazz Comping (2021)
When I first started to get comfortable playing jazz on the piano, I was eager to learn how to play with an ensemble. I knew my way through lots of tunes, and how to voice each chord. But, I didn't understand what my role was supposed to be in the rhythm section, or what I was supposed to do in order to support the…
582
I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one
I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one.
583
Programming is hard
Software is weird. In its basic form, software is this very abstract thing with seemingly little connection to the real world. Yet graphical applications running on a hardware device like a modern phone feel very real, even to people who have no appreciation of what happens within this “black box”. Some pieces of…
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The Erosion of Free Will: Why Society's Loss of Belief in Freedom Is Dangerous
Pay attention to how people are talking about freedom. It's a leading indicator of cultural (and economic) trends.
585
Where do our atoms come from?
Falling down a rabbit hole
586
Politics and the English Language (1946)
"Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
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Against Alcohol (2022)
A review of ‘Drink?: The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health’
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Humans Need Play
On a vicious pattern that breeds burnout.
590
Advice to a novice programmer
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Building a second income stream by writing a book
Spoiler: It’s quite possibly the hardest way to build a passive income stream.
592
Explosions are great, actually
The history of spaceflight is the story of weirdos, explosions, and stacked odds.
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How to find your blind spots
You probably aren't qualified to dissect your own failures because you're the idiot who screwed everything up.
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George Orwell's 6 rules for writing (2018; originally published in 1946)
George Orwell was greatly concerned with truth and language and how deliberately misleading language is used to conceal disagreeable political facts. To guide writers into writing clearly and truthfully, he proposed six writing rules.
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Story Behind Hackathon Photo
How a random stream of events ended up creating a picture with 57 million views
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How my brother's iCloud account was stolen
My brother got his iPhone stolen at gunpoint. This is the story of how he lost control of his iCloud account first (along with years of priceless memories, including my nephew's first steps) and how this couldn't have happened without Apple's incompetent support.
600
Why it’s necessary to shoot yourself in the foot
Without shooting yourself in the foot, learning lacks motivation. Complexity without reason is really confusing.