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How we gave colors names
“Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter in…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 57 posts.
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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…
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Algernon's Law
Why most supplements fail: IQ improvement skepticism, Yudkowsky & Bostrom’s heuristics, nootropics
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Malthusianisms
(See also: Umeshisms, Anthropicisms) Why, in real life, do we ever encounter hard instances of NP-complete problems? Because if it’s too easy to find a 10,000-mile TSP tour, we ask for a 9,0…
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Vim Koans
These koans have been independently translated into Chinese (archived) , thanks to Wanzhang Sheng, and into Spanish (archived) , thanks to Daniel Campoverde Carrión.
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Lean into the pain
When you first begin to exercise, it’s somewhat painful. Not wildly painful, like touching a hot stove, but enough that if your only goal was to avoid pain, you certainly would stop doing it. But if you keep exercising… well, it just keeps getting more painful. When you’re done, if you’ve really pushed yourself, you…
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Give it five minutes
A few years ago I used to be a hothead. Whenever anyone said anything, I’d think of a way to disagree. I’d push back hard if something didn’t fit my world-view. It’s like I had to be first with an opinion – as if being first meant something. But what it really meant…
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Mastering Linear Algebra in 10 Days: Astounding Experiments in Ultra-Learning
The MIT Challenge My friend Scott Young recently finished an astounding feat: he completed all 33 courses in MIT’s fabled computer science curriculum, from Linear ... Read more
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Most lives are lived by default
Jamie lives in a large city in the midwest. He's a copywriter for an advertising firm, and he's good at it. He's also good at thinking of reasons why he ought to be happy with his life. He has hea...
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Death Note: L, Anonymity & Eluding Entropy
Applied Computer Science: On Murder Considered As STEM Field—using information theory to quantify the magnitude of Light Yagami’s mistakes in 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡𝘩 𝑁𝑜𝑡𝑒 and considering fixes
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Smart people don't think others are stupid
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.
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Eight years today
The car in front of me kept hesitating. The driver couldn't seem to decide where to turn. Up ahead I could see that the light was green, but...
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Building my Own Laptop
We are building an open laptop, with some wacky features in it for hackers like me.
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Body Hacking: Thoughts Regarding My Magnet Implant
I've had a magnet implanted in my finger for about three years. Here are some thoughts about having the implant and feeling a whole new world.
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Windows 8 productivity: Who moved my cheese? Oh, there it is.
Disclaimer: I don't work for the Windows Team. I installed Windows 8 on my home ...
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Why I stopped working on the Bongard Problems
Please note: this text was written in the summer of 2007, and explains why I, the author, took a long respite from working on my research topics, after the summer of 2006. At the time when I wrote this, and up until around 2011, I had really stopped my research — so the title was correct up to then. Later, after 2011…