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Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,927 posts.
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Lines of code got a better publicist
A case against measuring AI-assisted engineering by code volume and other vanity metrics instead of outcomes.
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Donald Knuth – The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves (2017)
In 2015, I gave a talk in which I called Donald Knuth the Patron Saint of Yak Shaves . The reason is that Donald Knuth achieved the most perfect and long-running yak shave: TeX.
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This blog has moved
As of September 2018, I am moving Probably Overthinking It to a new location . Blogger has been an excellent host; so far, this blog has ...
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How I got a medal from the Army for writing code
In 2005 my National Guard unit was deployed to Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. My MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) in the Army was 92A, which is basically a logistics and supplies...
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What if we talked about over-60s’ screen time as we talk about young people’s?
In recent weeks this post has gone viral through several newsletters and aggregator sites, for all the wrong reasons. It has been rather bizarre to see people taking a post which is, and only ever was, about specific issues involving UK digital regulation and surveillance capitalism in the UK’s specific political and…
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If You Run a Small Business, Park in the Back of the Parking Lot
As a rule of thumb business owners should be primarily focused on delighting their customers in any way possible. Every subtle interaction should be closely optimized for customer enchantment, and a decision as simple as where to park your car can subconsciously attract or detract a customer.
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A new form of brain stimulation relieved severe depression in a small study
Stanford Medicine researchers used high doses of magnetic stimulation, delivered on an accelerated timeline and targeted to individual neurocircuitry, to treat patients with severe depression.
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Gödel, Escher, Bach: an in-depth explainer
[Thanks to Jacob Falkovich, Eric Neyman, and my LessWrong reviewer, among others, for their feedback on earlier drafts.] …
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Doomscrolling ourselves to death
James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages
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I Love Ruby
I've done a lot in my career. From working on business support software to big backend systems and even robotics. If there's been a consistent through-line to my career, it's the Ruby programming language.
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43 Hours on the Amtrak Southwest Chief
Personal blog and website of Lennart Koopmann.
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That time I told my wife I wanted to quit my job
It was midnight on May 22nd, 2016 that I pushed my first commit to GitHub for a new idea. Little did I know what would happen next.
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My weird new hobby: Wandering around Tokyo on Google Maps
My weird hobby lately is just wandering around Street View and zooming in on random stuff. Today I found a 350Z that shows up parked in the same Tokyo spot in every capture since 2009.
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Habits of highly mathematical people
The most common question students have about mathematics is “when will I ever use this?” Many math teachers would probably struggle to give…
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Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)
I recently discovered a simple step-by-step process that significantly increased my personal productivity and made me happier along the way.
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Someone on Torrent Sites Kept Fucking with My Sonarr
PLEASE stop putting skid malware on torrent sites as South Park episodes
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Teaching ChatGPT to speak my son’s invented language
Becoming fluent in my son’s invented language was too difficult for me, so I decided to see how would AI do.
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Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?
For my piece on Catholic miracle apologetics , I read (correction: skimmed) a 25,000-word post by rationalist blogger Scott Alexander. My piece, which cited (but does not focus on) his, ended up being a cool 2,700 words. I don't think it would benefit from being longer, and it was the result of me cutting around 70%…
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Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
New global study from Sapien Labs finds consistent links, stronger for girls
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How long does a freezer stay frozen when the power goes out?
I was curious how long things stay frozen in the freezer when there is a power outage. U already gave Raspberry Pi computers with temperature sensors on them from things like this experiment , this one or this one
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My Next Mac Mini
I think I might be getting old, but it took me completely by surprise that the Mac Mini we use in our lounge room as our TV was 6 years old. It's been such a...
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I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)
Microsoft Encarta came out in 1993 and was one of the first CD-ROMs I had. It ...
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If you don’t finish then you’re just busy, not productive
One of the biggest realisations I’ve come to as part of my PhD, is how little people care about how I spend my time, they only care about what I am able to deliver. Yet in order to deliver, you need to finish. I was recently reading an article on this topic, and I think the advice can be best summed up as:
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Amazon's ML University is making its online courses available to the public
Classes previously only available to Amazon employees will now be available to the community.