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Why Cruise Ships are My Favorite Remote Work Location
I'm currently on a cruise ship somewhere in the Mediterranean sea, en route from Barcelona to Casablanca. Most people here are either retirees enjoying the easy life or younger fol...
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 913 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
482
Math for eight-year-olds: graph theory for kids
This morning I had the pleasure to be a mathematical guest in my daughter’s third-grade class, full of inquisitive eight- and nine-year-old girls, and we had a wonderful interaction. Followin…
483
What to blog about
You should start a blog. Having your own little corner of the internet is good for the soul! But what should you write about? It’s easy to get hung up …
484
My Go Resolutions for 2017
’Tis the season for resolutions, and I thought it would make sense to write a little about what I hope to work on this year as far as Go is concerned.
485
Coding is not the new literacy
Despite the good intentions behind the movement to get people to code, both the basic premise and approach are flawed. The movement sits on the idea that “coding is the new literacy,” but that takes a narrow view of what literacy really is.
486
10-Year Exercise Periods Make Sense
Scott Kupor at Andreessen Horowitz has a post today on some potential downsides of 10-year exercise periods for startup employees’ stock options. I’d recommend reading the whole thing for context here, but to summarize: * He argues that allowing employees who leave a company to keep their optio...
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How to build a windmill
Windmills have always fascinated me and for a long time I was dreaming of one day building my own. Where I live there are still machines from the 1600’s that are just as magnificent today as when they were first built. When you see one standing in a field rotating and converting passing air into usable energy they…
489
So you think you can tell Arial from Helvetica?
I've taken 20 logos that were originally designed in Helvetica, and I've redone them in Arial. Some people would call that blasphemy. I call it a challenge: can you tell which is the original and which is the remake?
490
My Left Kidney
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491
Working Off-Grid Efficiently
For the first 3 years we tested the limits of our space, and at first, it was difficult to create new things, as we had to make time to learn how to solve the underlying problems. Our boat was not just an office, it was also our house and transport. As for us, we were artists, but also had to be plumbers, deckhands…
492
Aaron Swartz: The Book That Changed My Life
Two years ago this summer I read a book that changed the entire way I see the world. I had been researching various topics — law, politics, the media — and become more and more convinced that something was seriously wrong. Politicians, I was shocked to discover, weren’t actually doing what the people wanted. And the…
493
Aaron Swartz: What Happens in The Dark Knight
As we’ve discussed, in Batman Begins 1960s-style full employment and antipoverty programs lead to skyrocketing crime while in The Dark Knight Rises 1980s-style tough-on-crime policies and neoliberal economics lead to a revolt of the economic underclass. The films are mirror images, one about the failure of liberal…
494
Algorithmic Solution to My Insomnia
I’ve struggled with insomnia for all of my adult life. It began in college and has waxed and waned in severity ever since, correlating with stress levels…
495
The Melancholy of Subculture Society (2019)
Internet links small groups, helping dissolve big groups; good, bad? But a bit sad.
496
Postmortem: Every Frame a Painting
Every Frame a Painting is officially dead. Nothing sinister; we just decided to end it.
497
Off the Grid
People choose to live off-grid for self-sufficiency, resilience, or ecological reasons. For us, to live off-grid, is mostly letting go of the numbing culture of convenience and surrounding ourselves with systems we trust for long transits across the ocean. When far away from the coasts, we have to rely on our vessel…
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Making Your Writing Work Harder For You
Using teaching -- via writing, speaking, and the like -- to sell more software.
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Three Observations
Our mission is to ensure that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) benefits all of humanity. Systems that start to point to AGI* are coming into view, and so we think it’s important to...
503
The Zizians and the rationalist death cult
What is the deal with Rationalism and cults?
504
How to Drop Out (2004)
People who work get bored when they don't work. People who don't work never get bored.
505
ASCII and Unicode quotation marks
Do not use the ASCII character 0x60 (grave accent) as a left quotation mark together with 0x27 (apostrophe), because it will look silly with modern correct fonts.
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Writer: An Open Digital Typewriter (2018)
TL;DR: A digital typewriter based on a Raspberry Pi and an E-Ink screen. The code/build instructions are available on GitHub .
508
Algernon's Law
Why most supplements fail: IQ improvement skepticism, Yudkowsky & Bostrom’s heuristics, nootropics
509
Four Magic Words
Long ago, in a parallel universe three doors down and one to the left of our own, OpenAI headquarters found itself in chaos. A klaxon blared overhead as red lights began flashing. A message played over a loud-speaker: “Warning! Warning! This is not a drill! Artificial General Intelligence window
510
A Tale of Two Zippers
Recently, Akiba took me to visit his friend’s zipper factory. I love visiting factories: no matter how simple the product, I learn something new.