Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 63 posts.
The sophisticated "scientific concept" with the greatest potential to enhance human understanding may be argued to come not from the halls of academe, but rather from the unlikely research environment of professional wrestling.
After a decade of writing explanations, I've simplified the strategy I use to get new concepts to click. Here's how to teach yourself a difficult idea, or…
Learn how the Zettelkasten works as a system, what a Zettel is made of, and how to grow an organic web of knowledge.
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.
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…
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…
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…
Color blindness is an inaccurate term. Most color-blind people can see color, they just don't see the same colors as everyone else. There ha...
Here's the complete timeline of events. From my first denial to travel to the US until I eventually received a tourist visa. And then I can't go anyway. December 5-11, 2016 I spent a week on Hawaii with Mozilla - my employer at the time. This was my 12th visit to the US over a … Continue reading a US visa in 937 days →
Author, writer, and creator sharing insights on learning, writing, philosophy, entrepreneurship, and more.
Success in most things boils down to a simple, but easily ignored distinction: do the real thing and stop doing fake alternatives instead.
The Doomsday Algorithm gives the day of the week for any date (and you can do it in your head)
I. Vox asks What Went Wrong With The Media’s Coronavirus Coverage? They conclude that the media needs to be better at “not just saying what we do know, but what we don’t know”. This rai…
I spent way too long figuring out the how to make video calls feel natural. Here’s the best advice I came up with.
What we call intelligence is as much about virtues such as honesty, integrity, and bravery, as it is about raw intellect.
As a news junkie, tech journalist and founder of an online news platform called Blendle, I love a good old front page of a newspaper. When…
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
UPDATE Several years ago on my 68th birthday I wrote up 68 bits of advice for my adult children, and posted them here. Here are the first five bits: Learn how to learn from those you disagree with, or even … Continue reading →
Let's assume that there is a discussion going on on the Internet about programming languages. One of the design points that come up is a gar...
A look into me, my awful procrastination habit, and how I fixed it. (spoiler alert: it was ADHD)
How much Vitamin D should I take? This is still the looming question, and it’s time to address it. First, though, imagine that someone in a public forum online asked me, “How much metoprolol (a…
An exploration into top level domains. How I ended up buying netflix.soy and domains from facebook, microsoft and google.
Illustrated notes on the Building A Second Brain course
