Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 913 posts.
Jan Gampe took things to the next level by actually making this cross-stitch out of the pattern I previously posted online. The flowers really gave it an extra level of charm I think. As a cross-stitch As a pillow This quote is from a comment by an upset user on my blog, replying to one … Continue reading curl is just…
Official statistics say we are winning the War on Cancer. Cancer incidence rates, mortality rates, and five-year-survival rates have generally been moving in the right direction over the past few d…
Your entire worldview changes when you realize you can create luck.
Every now and again, someone emails me and asks for very general advice. ("How do I change the world?") With the caveat that I've only lived a fraction of one life, and am still trying to figure things out, here's the advice I'd give past me.
This post is about writing technical documentation. More specifically: it's about writing documentation for programming languages and libraries.
Here’s version 2 (September 2013). You can print this at 16.5″x10.75″ at 300dpi. Have an ordinary printer? Check out PosteRazor !
An issue popped up on Twitter this past week that caused the web site to be generally unusable for many users. It appears as if attempts to scroll were unbearably slow and caused the site to be unresponsive.
[This memoir essay appeared in the magazine Science 82 in April 1982, and in my 1982 book Infinity and the Mind. It’s based on the “Conversations With Godel” documented in my previous post. Some of the photos are from a recent trip through the West, others from the 1970s.] [This is a cropped version of
I spent way too long figuring out the how to make video calls feel natural. Here’s the best advice I came up with.
Programmers tend to worry too much and too soon about performance. Many college-level Computer Science classes focus on fancy algorithms to improve performance, but in real life performance rarely matters. Most real-world programs run plenty fast enough on today's machines without any particular attention to…
[Epistemic status: Speculative. I can’t make this post less condescending and elitist, so if you don’t like condescending elitist things, this might not be for you.] Developmental psych…
An old article, now removed due to being an old time capsule.
Why don't facts change our minds? This article explains the logic of false beliefs and proposes a better system for constructive conversation.
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.
The following are suggestions for the best magazine articles (in English) ever. Stars denote how many times a correspondent has suggested it. Submitter comments are in italics. For a great way to read long-form magazine articles on a tablet device see my review of LongForm and Instapaper here .
The most important step is the first one. Humanity didn't get good at building houses by building the same house a million times. We built lots of different houses and learned from each other's failures. Gravitating away from monopolies is a way everyone can help improve software, regardless of our abilities or needs.
Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It's written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don't ha
List of different knots for shoelace tying speed, simplicity, security or style.
Internet links small groups, helping dissolve big groups; good, bad? But a bit sad.
Some people on the internet are getting very excited at the (unconfirmed) reports of an "Earth-like" exoplanet orbiting Proxima Centauri , a mere 4.25 light-years away from Earth. If correct, the planet is orbiting in the liquid water zone around our nearest stellar neighbour and is of the same order of mass as the…
I authored 1 the announcement post on the Superlogical homepage , which describes the problem statement and what we're building. 2 Read that to learn more. This post is more of a personal statement about what led to this, how it relates to my recent work, and what comes next.
For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives.
Unrelated Update: To everyone who keeps asking me about the “new” P≠NP proof: I’d again bet $200,000 that the paper won’t stand, except that the last time I tried that, it d…
