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Letting go
Finding focus by opting out of distractions and negative experiences.
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,939 posts.
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The Scientific Virtues: Stupidity, Arrogance, Laziness
Science education usually starts with teaching students different tools and techniques, methods for conducting research. This is wrong. Science education should begin with the scientific virt…
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Turning my smartphone into a boring productivity tool
Tools do their job then get out of the way.
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The Right to Attention in an Age of Distraction
We are living through a crisis of attention that is now widely remarked upon, usually in the context of some complaint or other about...
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Cooklang – Managing Recipes in Git
A plain-text recipe format that generates shopping lists and keeps your recipes in git. Cooklang is like markdown for recipes. It lets you write recipes in a…
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Swedish Campground (2004)
We thought it was important for the user to be able to invoke every menu command directly from the keyboard, so we added a special key to the keyboard to invoke menu commands, just like our predecessor, Lisa. We called it the "Apple key"; when pressed in combination with another key, it selected the corresponding menu…
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Out to Get You
Epistemic Status: Reference. Expanded From: Against Facebook, as the post originally intended. Some things are fundamentally Out to Get You. They seek resources at your expense. Fees are hidden. E…
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Revisiting Minsky's Society of Mind in 2025
AI Agents, Modularity, and Alignment
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Nonograms: a practical guide with interactive examples
This is a very important technique: only fill cells when you’re certain; no guessing.
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The cult of busy
When I was young I thought busy people were more important than everyone else. Otherwise, why would they be so busy? I had busy parents and busy bosses, and I assumed they must always have importan…
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Taking a Break
My year at Figma.
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Creative Fansubbing Techniques: Part 2
This is my second article about some curious fansubbing techniques that I found when watching anime. Want to know what they are? Read on to find out!
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Habits of a Happy Node Hacker
This post is from 2013 - check out the update! For most of the nearly twenty years since its inception, JavaScript lacked many of the niceties that made...
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Mimetic Traps
I’ve been a graduate student in physics for almost three years, but I only recently figured out why. I had to tackle a simple question do so:
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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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Content, Forever
Got some time to kill and want to read a meandering essay by an algorithm with a short attention span? Tell us how many minutes you want to spend reading and a starting topic, and we'll whip something up.
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No, I’ll tell you the answer
Beware of advice that tries to change who you are. True wisdom guides you to a better version of yourself.
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Never Stop Hacking
A short note to myself: what makes programming fun isn't finishing tasks, it's the problems themselves and the process of learning. Never stop hacking.
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Obliterate Startup Depression
One of my favorite parts of the startup community is that we generally all acknowledge that we’re not playing a zero sum game. We create value by creating new markets and disrupting old, inefficient markets. Sure, we compete against each other as well, but in general, the communal spirit of entrepreneurship is a…
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5-HTTLPR: A Pointed Review
In 1996, some researchers discovered that depressed people often had an unusual version of the serotonin transporter gene 5-HTTLPR. The study became a psychiatric sensation, getting thousands of ci…
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It matters how you raise your kids
To parents besieged by expert advice, a new scientific idea offers relief: it’s no big deal how you raise your children....
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“That Won't Work”
Imagine the scene: Several people are discussing a problem that needs an urgent solution. Everyone is deep in thought, and one person proposes a solution. “We could…” and everyone listens intently. As soon as the person is done talking, or perhaps even before, somebody speaks up. “That won’t work!” he says. The…