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Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,940 posts.

Any year
8881

Radicalizing the Romanceless

[PLEASE NOTE: This post is from 2014.] [Content note: Gender, relationships, feminism, manosphere. Quotes, without endorsing and with quite a bit of mocking, mean arguments by terrible people. Some…

8883

The Unofficial Hacker News FAQ

Here is a small sample of stuff that pops up with some regularity, if you want me to add entries please mail me jacques@mattheij.com, if you ask a question that is hard to answer it may take a while before I can post it . Please note that I’m not affiliated with HN in any way other than being a user, the majority of…

8887

Lena (first draft)

A note from the author This was a very quick first draft, written in around two hours as part of my 30 More First Drafts project. You can now read the finished short story. This article is about the standard test brain image. For the original human, see [[Miguel A...

8890

So You Want Continuous Time Zones

At present the world is partitioned into a finite number of large, discrete time zones. A time zone is an area on Earth where all of the clocks are set to the same time. An example of a time zone is America/Santiago, an area which covers continental Chile. All the clocks in this ...

8893

You Are Still Crying Wolf

Go away, pro-Trump bots [Update 5/30: I originally took this post down because it got picked up by some pro-Trump accounts that I think were bots which would post it several times a day to various …

8896

Beware The Man Of One Study

Aquinas famously said: beware the man of one book. I would add: beware the man of one study. For example, take medical research. Suppose a certain drug is weakly effective against a certain disease…

8902

Ra

Magic is real. Discovered in the 1970s, magic is now a bona fide field of engineering. There's magic in heavy industry and magic in your home. It's what's next after electricity. Student mage Laura Ferno has designs on the future: her mother died trying to reach space using m...

8903

Adventures in Depression

Some people have a legitimate reason to feel depressed, but not me. I just woke up one day feeling sad and helpless for absolutely no reason...

8904

Ketamine: Now By Prescription

Last week the FDA approved esketamine for treatment-resistant depression. Let’s review how the pharmaceutical industry works: a company discovers and patents a potentially exciting new drug. …

8905

Undergraduation

March 2005 (Parts of this essay began as replies to students who wrote to me with questions.) Recently I've had several emails from computer science undergrads asking what to do in college. I might not be the best source of advice, because I was a philosophy major in college. But I took so many CS classes that most CS…