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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,927 posts.
Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death
The Mosquito Bucket of Death is a safe and environmentally sound way to rid your yard of mosquitoes. Here's how you make them.
I'm Loyal to Nothing Except the Dream
There is much I take for granted in my life, and the normal functioning of American government is one of those things. In my 46 years, I’ve lived under nine different presidents. The first I remember is Carter. I’ve voted in every presidential election since 1992, but I
Why was this secret?
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
How to grow professional relationships
My TJS model maps professional relationships across seven states, from zero-sum competition to toxic enmeshment, and why collaboration is the peak.
I made a new backplane for my consumer NAS
codedbearder's blog
Some insects I found inside dried Turkish figs from Trader Joe’s
During an online wasp identification course I participated in several weeks ago, there was a fun discussion about whether commercially-produced figs contained fig wasps (Agaonidae, in the Chalcidoidea). Opinions varied, plus some asserted, as do many internet pages, that even if wasps were once insi
I bought netflix.soy
An exploration into top level domains. How I ended up buying netflix.soy and domains from facebook, microsoft and google.
Mental Wealth
TL;DR • When it comes to mental health, our society approaches it like we did with physical health 50 years ago. We only think about it when something goes wrong. • To the wider public, mental heal…
The Illustrated Guide to a PhD
There's a bit more below, but I also wrote a follow-up 5 years after the illustrated guide which may be of interest -- HOWTO: Get tenure .
Linus Torvalds: Pearls before swine
My life isn't glamorous. I know that comes as a big shock to everybody, since geeks in general are seen as the crème de la crème of society,...
Where do the children play?
On the need for a world without us
The Art of Money Getting
P.T. Barnum was 70 years old when he turned his most popular lecture into this book in 1880. By then, he’d already built America’s most famous museum in New York, introduced General Tom Thumb to audiences, served as mayor of Bridgeport, gone broke from a disastrous investment in a Connecticut clock company, and clawed…
The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows
Without permission, a marketing agency republished the entirety of John Koenig's Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows book, replacing its art with AI slop and adding new AI words. Their unauthorized site now ranks higher than the real one everywhere.
Winning at Candy Crush
I find Flash games on Facebook great fun. Not playing them, of course, that’s boring. As you may remember from my previous post, “ winning at Puzzle Adventures ”, I like to take a look into their guts and figure out how they work, and whether or not I can get insane scores with no effort.
C Is Best (2025)
Since its inception on 2000-05-29, SQLite has been implemented in generic C. C was and continues to be the best language for implementing a software library like SQLite. There are no plans to recode SQLite in any other programming language at this time.
I think I have LLM burnout
I didn't expect to get so tired of reading LLM output.
The Apprentice Programmer
I dropped out of school when I was 16 years old. School was not for me. To me, computers were so much more interesting. Right or wrong, I felt like I wasted my time there and my real education was starting when I came home. I lost respect for the institution and of course this meant that I no longer bothered to put any
The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
Discuss this study on my forum or see discussion on Hacker News (>400 points, >350 comments). Abstract I slept 4 hours a night for 14 days and didn’t find any effects on cognition (assessed via Psychomotor Vigilance Task, a custom first-person shooter scenario, and SAT). I’m a 22-year-old male and normally I sleep 7-8…
75% of med students are on antidepressants, stimulants, or both? (2017)
As scientists, we can’t continue to approach medical education reform as a neurotransmitter deficiency in medical students. Can we?
“Subject: Urgent Warning”
Back in December I got a desperate email from this person. A woman who said her Instagram had been hacked and since she found my contact info in the app she mailed me and asked for help. I of course replied and said that I have nothing to do with her being hacked but I … Continue reading “Subject: Urgent Warning” →