631
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,030 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
632
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…
633
Trapped priors as a basic problem of rationality
P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.
634
Vim Koans
These koans have been independently translated into Chinese (archived) , thanks to Wanzhang Sheng, and into Spanish (archived) , thanks to Daniel Campoverde Carrión.
635
How to write a novel using the snowflake method (2013)
How to write a novel: Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson teaches his wildly popular Snowflake Method for designing and writing a novel.
636
637
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…
638
Varieties of Argumentative Experience
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…
639
The Map Is Not the Territory (2015)
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.
640
Of Money, Responsibility, and Pride
Fate has made me the “money guy” for OpenSSL so I’m going to talk about that for a bit.
641
642
The Apprentice Programmer (2013)
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
643
On Hubris and Humility
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!
644
So long, and thanks for the Ph.D.
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.
645
646
Which Emoji Scissors Close?
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…
647
The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill
The tech industry, especially the security industry, seems outrageously overwhelming to newcomers and even as an intermediate “InfoSec Pro” there seems to be an overwhelming number of paths and topics one can focus on. The problem most of us, especially newcomers, encounter is that we don’t know what to focus on. Even…
648
On the Use of a Life
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…
649
Be Kind
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.
650
From where I left
Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez)20241,190 points455 commentscited by 4Life, Learning & Writing details
651
Programming books you might want to consider reading
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…
652
I made my own clear plastic tooth aligners and they worked
10 Mar 2016 | self-Amos , making , orthodontics , laser-scanning , prototyping , somatic feedback
653
Dumber phone
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…
654
The hardest working font in Manhattan
A story of a 150-year-old font you have never heard of – and one you probably saw earlier today.
655
656
On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
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.
657
A Decade of Slug
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…
658
659
660
When in doubt: hang up, look up, and call back
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…