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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,939 posts.
The tech world is obsessed with what’s next. It has become so used to the constant flow of new products and new companies that newness itself has been placed on a pedestal. But outside of a few breakthroughs here and there, most things that are good are good because they got there slowly. …
[JARED DIAMOND:] In Guns, Germs, and Steel I asked why history has unfolded differently over the last 13,000 years in Eurasia, in the Americas, in sub-Saharan Africa, and in Aboriginal Australia, with the result that within the last 500 years Europeans were the ones who conquered Native Americans and Aboriginal…
I discovered that they’d published a complete, illustrated version of the Earthsea cycle a couple weeks ago. I’m not overly fond of omnibus editions, but this is illustrated by Charles …
I speak very fast. It’s like the words are piled up in my mouth and I can’t say one without the rest tumbling out. Through my whole life people have told me to slow down, speak more clearly, and enunciate. I can do it if I concentrate but I quickly relapse into gushing out words. As I now give lots of conference…
I saw this Mastodon post from Andy Wingo recently: in these days of coding agents and what-not, i often think of gerald sussman's comm...
How I make it work (or not)
physics, history of science, pseudoscience, hoaxes, writing, education, skepticisism, humor, quotes, illusions, 3d stereo photography.
Summary: Eric Sink provides a geek-oriented overview of accounting and company funding.
Test your English vocabulary size and measure how many words you know with Preply's free test (ex. Testyourvocab.com). For children, adults and EFL/ESL learners.
It happened for me back in the eighties, when I encountered the definition of “Life” in Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker : “Information, shaped by natural selection”. That concise distillation—an actual description of what life is , as opposed to all those tired and exception-prone checklists that only talk about what…
Dust-to-digital posted this lovely performance of “Washington Blues” by Elizabeth Cotten. It reminded me that she is the greatest and that I should write more about her. If you are a gu…
We are deeply saddened by the news that our member, colleague, and friend Ben “bushing” Byer has passed away.
Imposter syndrome is often presented as a personal failing. A lack of confidence, our wrong-headed beliefs not matching the reality of how competent we are, or worst of a flaw of our gender. Just...
Ju ci (锔瓷), the Chinese craft of repairing broken porcelain has roots dating back to the Song dynasty (960-1279), with illustrations of craftsmen mending pots appearing in Chinese paintings as earl…
On the Hacker News leaderboard I'm currently in position #12 with 32,360 points. I was curious to find out how I ended up in that position...
Texts on this and that.
When I worked in magazines, almost twenty years ago, something we always held true was that sales went up twenty per cent when the words…
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.
What AI-optimized schools misunderstand about learning
I'd rather argue with strangers on the Internet.
