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Button Stealer
Steals buttons from the websites you visit. Do your usual online stuff and watch the collection of stolen buttons grow.
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,932 posts.
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Math for seven-year-olds
As a guest today in my daughter’s second-grade classroom, full of math-enthusiastic seven-and-eight-year-old girls, I led a mathematical investigation of graph coloring, chromatic numbers, ma…
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When you want to quit because it's just not worth it
Are you crying in the shower because you can't handle it anymore? Beyond Impostor Syndrome: Complete melt-down? Well, at least you're in good company.
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The Best Things and Stuff of 2021
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2021. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
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I'm quitting my PhD
Just a bit over half a year ago, I started my PhD in Quantum Computing. Even though I basically didn’t have any previous knowledge about it, I thought Quantum Computing was an interesting challenge to get into. What should I say? Quantum Computing is really cool, indeed! Having a background in Theoretical Informatics…
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Surgery, the Ultimate Placebo
Ian Harris explains that more than half of commonly performed surgical operations may be placebos. Adequate studies using a blinded control group are essential. Ian Harris, a Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, wrote a book titled Surgery, The Ultimate Placebo. I…
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An iOS app update that annoys me
Almost a year ago I started using a delightful little iOS app called Receipt Box. It did exactly what I wanted: I could tap in an expense and a category, and the app added a geo location to the exp...
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What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)
As part of my job I spend quite a lot of time scanning through files and disk contents, often in hex or filtered text view, searching for sp...
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Does your office have a library?
Let's get weird... here are some questions. These questions aren't special questions or specifically meant as only this set of questions... they are just questions that capture the spirit of 'pause and think on some stuff that you don't'. Fill in your own questions if you have better ones.
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Run Your Own Website
I go back and forth on running my own website. I love [working](Re Introducing First Crack.txt) [on](First Crack Release Notes 0619.txt) [First Crack](/projects.html#firstCrack), but that work can become trying. I have little time for [projects](/projects.html), and the more I spend coding, the less I [read](My…
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Surviving the front page of Hacker News on a 50 Mbps uplink
Overview of basic analytics during that one time my blog post got traction on HackerNews, and the steps I took to prepare for just this occasion.
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A prescient footnote
Back in 2004, who could have imagined Apple’s astonishing rise to overtake Microsoft as the most valuable tech company in the world?
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Do the weirdest thing that feels right
From "what to write" to "how to live" | Castles in the Sky #35
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Down the mechanical keyboard rabbit hole
I’m writing this to share my experience adapting to weird keyboards and layouts.
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The Curse of Smart People
A bit over 3 years ago, after working for many years at a series of startups (most of which I co-founded), I disappeared through a Certain V...
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Recovering from AI addiction
Welcome to Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous! We’re glad you’ve found us, and we hope our community can be as helpful to you as it has been for us. ITAA is a Twelve-Step fellowship of individuals who support each other in recovering from internet and technology addiction. This includes social media addiction…
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Do We Worship Complexity?
Complexity is the most important challenge in software development. So it is important to always strive to eliminate complexity. But sometimes we worship complexity - and that can make complexity problems unsolvable.
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The appeal of using plain HTML pages (2019)
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Sleeping longer than 6.5 hours/day can help you lose weight: study
According to a recent study, sleeping an extra hour could help you lose weight if you're not sleeping enough to begin with
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Completing a computer science degree on Coursera
A short write-up on my experience completing a Computer Science BSc from my bedroom.
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If you care about security you might want to move the iPhone Camera app
There's a quirk in the iPhone Camera app that can drive a security conscious iPhone owner crazy: if you touch your finger on the Camera app ...
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I Was Just Told “You would not have made it through the weekend”
“You would not have made it through the weekend” Today the dentist told me I would have been in the hospital and would have been lucky to make it through last weekend had I not made an …