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Kelly Can't Fail
Introduction You may have heard of the Kelly bet allocation strategy. It is a system for correctly exploiting information or bias in a gambling situation. It is also known as a maximally aggressive…
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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 530 posts.
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Everything Is Just Functions: 1 week with David Beazley and SICP
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
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Gödel, Escher, Bach is the most influential book in my life (2022)
Musings on Hofstadter’s phenomenal book about computation, consciousness, and epistemology.
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Fragmented thinking is a bigger threat to flow state than interruptions
What I learned after reading 14 studies about flow state
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Mental health in software engineering
I was pacing around my apartment at 2 a.m., palms sweaty, convinced the production database had already gone up in flames. It hadn’t, of course, but my
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A solution to The Onion problem of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (2021)
Kenji López-Alt posed a mathematical problem on his YouTube channel about how to best cut an onion. I present a detailed solution.
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Notes on Tajikistan
Over the summer, I spent about two weeks in Tajikistan, mostly in Dushanbe (the capital) and various points along the Pamir Highway, which borders Afghanistan and later leads into Kyrgyzstan. This …
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So you wanna de-bog yourself
What I found in the mire
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Never Missing the Train Again
How I built a transit dashboard with Rust, Skia, and an old Kindle
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Programming languages that blew my mind (2023)
I’ve been a programmer since the age of 8, and some kind of developer for most of my life. Throughout my life as a coder, both hobbyist and professional, I’ve learnt plenty of programming languages that felt like cookie-cutter clones of each other, but also a few programming languages that changed the way I looked at…
101
The Greatest Educational Life Hack: Learning Math Ahead of Time
Learning math early guards you against numerous academic risks, opens all kinds of doors to career opportunities, and allows you to enter those doors earlier in life (which in turn allows you to accomplish more over the course of your career).
102
A bad day at the office
While looking for something else, I came across this rather incredible photo in the Imperial War Museum collection. That's a seaplane stuck 300 feet up a 350ft tall radio mast! If that's not amazing enough, the pilot was rescued by three men who climbed up to retrieve him. And he survived.
103
Google’s AI thinks I left a Gatorade bottle on the moon
Google’s NotebookLLM is the first AI podcast I’d actually listen to. Give it a web page or document, and it will generate you a podcast about it.
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Dungeons and Dragons taught me how to write alt text
Describe the most important thing first.
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The unexpected poetry of PhD acknowledgements
After reading hundreds and hundreds of PhD theses, we accidentally discovered how to write the perfect PhD acknowledgement: it's a kind of poetry.
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Stop postponing things by embracing the mess
Does your day get derailed frequently because of unexpected circumstances?
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How to Replace Your CPAP in Only 666 Days
This story is not practical advice. For me, it’s closing the book on an almost two-year saga. For you, I hope it’s an enjoyable bit of bureaucratic schadenfreude. For Anthem, I hope it’s the subject of a series of painful but transformative meetings. This is not an isolated event. I’ve had dozens of struggles with…
108
Feynman’s Razor
If an expert can't understand your explanation, you've dumbed it down too much!
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How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent
This is a blog post aimed at people who want to do important work or make meaningful contributions to work, but feel they aren’t that smart and don’t have any talent. Thanks for reading Adaobi’s Newsletter!
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So long, and thanks for all the bytes
Goodbye Tech, Hello Future
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Crossing the USA by Train
Today, I get to start a train trip I've always wanted to do: Going from New York to San Francisco!!
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Math from Three to Seven
Math from Three to Seven: The Story of a Mathematical Circle for Preschoolers, Alexander Zvonkin (Moscow Center for Continuing Mathematical Education, 2007).
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EmacsConf 2024 Notes
The videos have been uploaded , thank-you notes have been sent, and the kiddo has decided to play a little Minecraft on her own, so now I get to write some quick notes on EmacsConf 2024 .
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Should this be a map or 500 maps?
500 priests, cartographic n00bism, and the limits of scale
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Where I'm at on the whole CSS-Tricks thing
It was March 2022 when I sold CSS-Tricks to DigitalOcean. So it’s been just about 2 years now. This was me and my wife’s thinking: The negotiated sale price was fair. They are a big com…
117
Fixing annoying blue standby lights
A simple and free fix for those annoying over bright blue standby lights on home electronics (TV, Stereo, Set top box, etc.)
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Managing my motivation as a solo dev
One of the biggest sticking points of being a solo dev is maintaining motivation. I’ve been keeping a journal entry about how to hack my motivation, what works and what doesn’t. Here are the things that have worked. Convert external sources to motivation I’ve always known that I’m more extrinsically than intrinsically…
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What I think about when I edit (2019)
I’m often asked to edit friends’ or coworkers’ writing, anything from emails to short stories to documentation. Recently, someone asked me how I edit. What am I looking for? How do I know what changes to make? That made me stop and think about what I’ve been doing semi-instinctually.
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So long WordPress
This has been a hard post for me to write after participating in WordPress since before I even started a career in tech and, until 3 months ago, for my entire tech career. That said, it has been in the making for quite a while now and it is time that I make it official. I’ve officially left the WordPress project after…