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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 669 posts.
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The “three things” exercise for getting things out of talks (2011)
(More general advice on going to talks is here . As with all my webpages, feedback is more than welcome!)
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Impacts of lack of sleep
Sleep is important. People vastly underestimate the extent to which not sleeping is harmful, viewing it as a valid trade off for productivity and overlooking all of the longterm negative effects.
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Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)
I’d read a few times that bringing the temperature of a failing drive down will increase its reliability long enough to salvage important files. When the drive in my trusty Powerbook decided one day last week to stop booting and make horrible clicking sounds, I decided to test the theory.
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My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter
It turns out that you can't trust any USB type A power adapter to be within spec.
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Engineers Need to Write
I hated writing in high school.
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Nobody cares about your blog
Nobody cares about your blog, but you should keep writing!
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What I Learned Reading 1k Investor Reports
I read 1,000 investor reports last year.
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Asking your customers what they want doesn't work
And how can you figure it out what they really need
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Buy well, buy once
Carl Jeffrey @fellowcreative (fellow™) is a Designer and Doer sharing ideas and thinking on creativity, community, sustainability, strategy, technology…
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Shields Up
Years and years ago, I helped the Weekly World News make a book. While their periodical was weekly, it certainly wasn’t news. They were just four people in a small office in Florida. They gle…
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How to spend money on your friends without it looking like bribery
Owning things is more socially acceptable than renting them.
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A literary history of fake texts in Apple's marketing materials
Exploring the Applecore style
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Coffee in a Can
Life’s inconveniences, when they happen to you and me, are just that. Inconveniences. When they happen to some people though they end up becoming multi-billion dollar businesses. This is the story of Japan’s canned coffee. One finds at least one vending machine in almost every street in
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A Blog Post with Every HTML Element
Patrick Weaver’s Website
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Researchers treat depression by reversing brain signals traveling the wrong way
A new study led by Stanford Medicine researchers is the first to reveal how magnetic stimulation treats severe depression: by correcting the abnormal flow of brain signals.
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Getting my library cards onto my phone the hard way
Our local libraries, The Seattle Public Library and the King County Library System, issue pieces of plastic with barcodes printed on the back assigned to your borrower account. These cards are not strictly necessary in 2023; most everything at Seattle libraries is self-service, including circulation, and these…
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How to Stare at Your Phone Without Losing Your Soul
Why tracking screen time doesn't matter and improving the relationship with your phone requires conscious decisions.
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My dad built a cool thing but never boasted about it
My dad built something cool but didn't boast about it
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How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016)
Learn to improve the brightness and clarity of images in your mind's eye. Image Streaming is an easy technique to learn. Is it a cure for aphantasia?
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Why take a compiler course? (2010)
[…] Embedded in Academia : Why Take a Compiler Course? – Seconded, or whatever – my compiler course was briefer than I'd have liked but many of my peers didn't take it and I spent ages explaining what I thought where simple concepts to them when working on group projects and the like. […]
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How to draw dotted lines on chalkboards, MIT style (2021)
Archived MIT Admissions blog post 'how to draw dotted lines on chalkboards, mit style,' published May 20, 2021. Preserved for historical context; not maintained as current admissions policy.
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A note to young folks: download the things you love
Many years ago, my favorite podcast was The Totally Rad Show. It was a fun video podcast where the hosts reviewed movies, games, TV shows, and other general nerd stuff. The hosts were Jeff Cannata (who last year I called the podcasting GOAT), Dan Trachtenberg (who went on to direct
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Own your work
One of the easiest ways to start sharing your work in the form of writing, designs, or photographs is by using the latest trendy platform in that space, especially when everyone else seems to be using it. How many Blogspot sites are you checking these days? They still work, but Google has killed one or two services…
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How to register a Kei truck in Pennsylvania
Kei trucks are a special designation of Japanese car that have very small engines (660cc) and dimensions (~10m^3). Tell 'em, Wikipedia . Whoever coined the idea of "creative constraints" should take a gander at Kei trucks; there's definitely an upper bound:
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Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake
I bought the iPad Pro M1 chip in hopes of a lightweight, fast, multi-purpose device that I could also code on.
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Amateurs obsess over tools, pros over mastery
Anyone who posts silly lists like "15 AI tools you can't miss" is truly the one who is lost
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