Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 913 posts.
The map is not the territory reminds us that our mental models of the world are not the same as the world itself. It cautions against confusing our abstractions and representations with the complex, ever-shifting reality they aim to describe.
Fate has made me the “money guy” for OpenSSL so I’m going to talk about that for a bit.
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
Last week I gave a talk at the Open Source Firmware Conference about some of the work I’m doing at Oxide Computer, entitled On Hubris and Humility. There is a video of the talk if you’d like to watch it in video form. It came out pretty alright!
A guide to surviving graduate school, from the perspective of what I wished I had known at the start but had to learn the hard way instead.
Ah, scissors. They’re important enough that we have an emoji for them. On your device, it appears as ✂️. Unlike the real world tool it represents, the emoji’s job is to convey the idea, especially at small sizes. It doesn’t need to be able to swing or cut things. Nevertheless, let’s judge them on that irrelevant…
First, to dispense with the philosophical argument: Yes, this is my life, and yes, I'm free to use — or waste — it however I please; but I don't think there's anything wrong with asking if this is how my time could be best spent. That applies doubly if the question is not merely about the choices I made but is rather…
Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on the people around you. It requires you be mindful of their feelings and considerate of the way your presence affects them.
Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez)20241,190 points455 commentscited by 4Life, Learning & Writing details
There are a lot of “12 CS books every programmer must read” lists floating around out there. That's nonsense. The field is too broad for almost any topic to be required reading for all programmers, and even if a topic is that important, people's learning preferences differ too much for any book on that topic to be the…
10 Mar 2016 | self-Amos , making , orthodontics , laser-scanning , prototyping , somatic feedback
Less is exponentially more – Rob Pike Smart phones are useful, but they are also incredibly addictive, and that addiction is at the epicenter of Silicon Valley’s effort to grab an ever-increasing percentage of our minds. If a substance or behavior controls us, it becomes our master, and that just won’t do. For the…
A story of a 150-year-old font you have never heard of – and one you probably saw earlier today.
Meta-Note: I’m sorry it’s been so long between articles; for better or worse writing here is something that I do for fun, and sometimes work and family get in the way.
What is now known as the Slug Algorithm for rendering fonts directly from Bézier curves on the GPU was developed in the Fall of 2016, so this year marks a full decade since its inception. I published a paper in JCGT about the technique in the middle of 2017, and my company sold the first license for version 1.0 of the…
Many security-conscious people probably think they’d never fall for a phone-based phishing scam. But if your response to such a scam involves anything other than hanging up and calling back the entity that claims to be calling, you may be in for a rude awakening. Here’s how one security and tech-savvy reader got taken…
File synchronization can be fun and painless if you don’t have to deal with corporate bullshit.
This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history. Let me back up a bit.
My book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications , recently passed the milestone of 100,000 copies sold. Last year, it was the second-best-selling book in O’Reilly’s entire catalogue, second only to Aurélien Géron’s machine learning book . Machine learning is obviously a hot topic, so I am quite content with coming…
Strategies and tactics for staying productive.
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.
My colleague Julius par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
A way out from the perfectionism trap
