Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 33 posts.
One day in the mid-1920s, a Moscow newspaper reporter named Solomon Shereshevsky entered the laboratory of the psychologist Alexander Luria. Shereshevsky's boss at the newspaper had noticed that Shereshevsky never needed to take any notes, but somehow still remembered all he was told, and had suggested he get his…
My dad emigrated from Colombia to North America when he was 18 looking looking for a better life. For my brother and I that meant a lot of standing outside in the cold. My dad’s preferred method of improving his lot was improving lots, and my brother and I were “voluntarily” recruited to help working on the buildings…
The smartest people in the world use mental models to make intelligent decisions, avoid stupidity, and increase productivity. Let's take a look at how ...
Before reading, please set your irony detector to the on position. If you find yourself inclined to dismiss the below as paranoid, you should know that the design behind the current American school system is very well-documented historically, in published writings of dizzying cynicism by such well-known figures as…
Writing or speaking English, we always face a conundrum when we need a pronoun to refer to a person without specifying gender. Previously we needed a way to cover both male and female; nowadays some people state that they don't want to be considered either of those, and I believe in respecting their wishes.
Back to: PSA: Please don't nominate the Laundry Files for a Best Series Hugo Award (this year) | Forward to: New Book Week!
Jacobite – which is apparently still a real magazine and not a one-off gag making fun of Jacobin – summarizes their article Under-Theorizing Government as “You’ll never hear…
For the past four years, I’ve worked as a software developer at Google. On February 1st, I quit. It was because they refused to buy me a Christmas present.
I think I am at least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me for productivity tips. So I decided to just write them all down in one place. Compound growth gets...
We can admit our knowledge gaps without devaluing our expertise.
your case is still going through administrative processing and we don't know when that process will be completed. Last year I was denied to go to the US when I was about to travel to San Francisco. Me and my employer's legal team never got answers as to why this happened so I've personally tried … Continue reading…
In early 2016 I eventually decided it was my turn to take part in this project. I decided my job was going to be presenting the potential and the beauty inside these sketches. I selected those that I found most interesting and genuine and diverse, then rendered them as if they were real. I became the executor of these…
Far below the Antarctic circle, I watch a woman cry real tears because she can’t get gluten-free toast.
Translator and proofreader’s note: There are large parts of this document that don’t parse well either from Chinese or from Naomi’s written…
Misc thoughts, memories, proto-essays, musings, etc.
In 2008, Paul Graham wrote How To Disagree Better, ranking arguments on a scale from name-calling to explicitly refuting the other person’s central point. And that’s why, ever since 200…
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 beginner's guide to longevity research
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.
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…
I collect music by buying physical CDs, digitizing them with Exact Audio Copy , and scanning the artwork. This is sometimes challenging if the CD was self-published in a limited run in a foreign country ten years ago. It is very challenging if the CDs have an innate defect that renders some tracks unreadable.
These are some mental models I find useful. They’re rooted in decades of experience of thousands of experts – a modern equivalent of folk wisdom. Mental models are useful to quickly and correctly reason about seemingly intractable problems. They require quite a bit of intuition to properly internalize, but once you’ve…
Email is not a messaging protocol. It’s a TODO list. Or at least my inbox is a TODO list and email is the protocol for putting stuff on it. Here’s the problem. It is a s**tty TODO list. Any one of you can put something on my TODO list. And I don’t want that.
