Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,030 posts.
Profession , copyright ©1957 by Street and Smith Publications, Inc., from ISAAC ASIMOV: THE COMPLETE STORIES OF VOL. 1 by Isaac Asimov. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. For on-line information about other Random House, Inc. books and authors, see the Internet Web site at…
When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly servility on his purple face. “Alright. Please wait!” he said to the general, speaking in Russian with the French accent which he used when…
The sustainability pages are essentially done, although I plan to improve them and respond to inadequacies people find. Having done my best to show that material progress is sustainable, I can justifiably turn my attention to the future and present ideas about what progress people will want and what can be achieved…
The classic beginner's mistake in Argentina is to neglect the first steak of the day. You will be tempted to just peck at it or even skip it altogether, rationalizing that you need to save yourself for the much larger steak later that night. But this is a false economy, like refusing to drink water in the early parts…
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
I. Albion’s Seed by David Fischer is a history professor’s nine-hundred-page treatise on patterns of early immigration to the Eastern United States. It’s not light reading and not…
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the…
I. Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciou…
At present the world is partitioned into a finite number of large, discrete time zones. A time zone is an area on Earth where all of the clocks are set to the same time. An example of a time zone is America/Santiago, an area which covers continental Chile. All the clocks in this ...
March 2005 (Parts of this essay began as replies to students who wrote to me with questions.) Recently I've had several emails from computer science undergrads asking what to do in college. I might not be the best source of advice, because I was a philosophy major in college. But I took so many CS classes that most CS…
In the 1950s, a shady outfit called Obetrol Pharmaceuticals made a popular over-the-counter diet pill called Obetrol...
I felt like I somehow needed fame. In retrospect, there was a lot of self-loathing from tough childhood experiences, and I desperately hoped that love from without (i.e., from masses of other people) would somehow make up for hate from within.
I fight a disease every day that is considered a joke by society
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.
For decades now, I have been haunted by the grainy, black-and-white x-ray of a human skull.
Carol Dweck was obsessed with failure. You know how some people just seem to succeed at everything they do, while others seem helpless, doomed to a life of constant failure? Dweck noticed that too — and she was determined to figure out why. So she began watching kids, trying to see if she could spot the difference…
“With all the time you spend watching TV,” he tells me, “you could have written a novel by now.” It’s hard to disagree with the sentiment — writing a novel is undoubtedly a better use of time than watching TV — but what about the hidden assumption? Such comments imply that time is “fungible” — that time spent watching…
I. “Pseudoaddiction” is one of the standard beats every article on the opioid crisis has to hit. Pharma companies (the story goes) invented a concept called “pseudoaddiction”…
This article will help you overcome one of the greatest difficulties you will face when trying to accelerate learning: formulating knowledge.
On Wednesday, May 31, 2023, I finally regained access to my Amazon account after an unexpected and unwarranted lockout that lasted nearly…
This story is part of Cory Doctorow’s 2007 short story collection “Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present,” published by Thunder’s Mouth, a division of Avalon Books. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, about which you’ll find more at the end of this file.
This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind…
What is your idea of fun? Kelly Cordes details The Fun Scale, measuring the degrees of fun activities in the outdoors.
