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Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,940 posts.
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Paul Buchheit: The first thing that you need to understand about humans
Humans aren't rational -- they rationalize. And I don't just mean "some of them" or "other people". I'm talking about everyone. We have a "l...
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A Defense of Philosophy (against Paul Graham)
In How to Do Philosophy , Paul Graham claims that “judging from their works, most philosophers up to the present have been wasting their time.” His point is that philosophy per se is structurally flawed. How?
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Some fun mathematical puzzles
Explore research at Microsoft, a site featuring the impact of research along with publications, products, downloads, and research careers.
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The Surprising Psychology of Impressiveness
Steve and David Let’s try a simple experiment. Imagine that you’re an admissions officer at a competitive college, and you’re evaluating the following two applicants: ... Read more
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Why I left math
Reading how shocked Doron Zeilberger is at the state of modern mathematics reminded me of why I left the subject. Math departments regularl...
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How Authors Really Make Money: The Rebirth of Seth Godin
What do the economics of publishing look like… really? (Photo: thinkpanama) (Special thanks to my agent, Steve Hanselman, and my anonymous sources within the world’s biggest publishing houses) Print is dead! This has become a popular headline, and a great way to get quoted, as Nicholas Negroponte has shown. Iconic…
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Burnout
If you hang around technology companies long enough, you or someone you know may experience “burnout” – a state of emotional exhaustion, doubt and cynicism. Burnout can turn productive emplo…
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How to use time travel to improve your life.
I’ve discovered a way to bring a new perspective to your life. To explain it, I have to tell a little story. Driving home Friday night, I was remembering a time years ago, when my daughter Lauren (now…
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How to Solve Hard Problem Sets Without Staying Up All Night
I Have all the Time in the World… Last weekend, I sat down for a cup of coffee with Jake from College Chronicles fame. We ... Read more
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Stress and its consequences for software development
For decades we have known that some people are 25 times more productive than most in software engineering jobs. We also know that there are “gelled teams” which are consistently 10 times more productive than most across the whole project lifecycle.
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On "magic", once again (from James Bennet, Django dev)
So it seems Giles Bowkett [is upset](http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/07/do-you-believe-in-magic.html) about use of the word "magic". I'm happy to agree with the general …
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Required Reading (for pythonistas)
At work, we have a wiki page that’s called Required Reading. Named after that oh-so-lovely tradition in high school or college of having books that you needed to read over the summer before you sta...