Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 57 posts.
There is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format.
Also see Xiph.Org's new video, Digital Show & Tell , for detailed demonstrations of digital sampling in action on real equipment!
There's no speed limit (2009)
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.
Learning from 20 years of personal analytics
Utilizing data analysis capabilities in Wolfram|Alpha Pro, Stephen Wolfram looks at his quantified self based on his large collection of lifelogging data.
Richard Feynman’s Caltech Graduation Address on Integrity
physics, history of science, pseudoscience, hoaxes, writing, education, skepticisism, humor, quotes, illusions, 3d stereo photography.
A Modern Space Cadet
I spend a lot of my time (easily over 8 hours a day) at a keyboard. As you might have guessed from my previous entries about Vim and Mutt I'm not averse to spending a few hours to improve an environment I'm going to be spending tens of thousands of hours in over the next few years, so it shouldn't be a shock that my…
A standing desk for $22
I’ve been interested in standing desks for a while. I keep reading things like: he who sits the most dies the soonest. All the options online are expensive. Until now. Ryan Witt and I combined our brains to see if we could come up with a better solution: Introducing
The 4% Rule: The Easy Answer to “How Much Do I Need for Retirement?”
In the world of early retirees, we have a concept that goes by names like “The 4% rule”, or “The 4% Safe Withdrawal Rate”, or simply “The SWR.” As with all thing…
The Backfire Effect
The Misconception: When your beliefs are challenged with facts, you alter your opinions and incorporate the new information into your thinking. The Truth: When your deepest convictions are challeng…
Hunting Down My Son's Killer
To find it, a team of scientists at Duke University used whole-exome sequencing (a protein-focused variant of whole-genome sequencing) on me, my wife and my son.
Believe you can change
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…
The Homely Mutt
Now that Sparrow is effectively dead many of its users will be looking for a new email client. If you're not afraid of the terminal you may want to give Mutt a try.
Hellbanned from Hacker News
Yesterday I submitted a post on Hacker News out of frustration at moderators pedantically changing post titles. After quickly rising to the number two spot on the front page with 482 points and 37 comments, the post was deleted by a moderator, presumably the operator of the site, Paul Graham.
A Word to the Resourceful
January 2012 A year ago I noticed a pattern in the least successful startups we'd funded: they all seemed hard to talk to. It felt as if there was some kind of wall between us. I could never quite tell if they understood what I was saying. This caught my attention because earlier we'd noticed a pattern among the most…
Look at yourself objectively
In the 1840s, hospitals were dangerous places. Mothers who went in to give birth often didn’t make it out. For example, at Vienna General Hospital’s First Obstetrical Clinic, as many as 10% of mothers died of puerperal fever after giving birth. But there was some good news: at the Second Clinic, the number was just…
Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates
What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now. This s…
The Elephant in the Bath-House
Mary Eberstadt’s Weekly Standard article The Elephant in the Sacristy shines a strong light on facts that will discomfit many of the politically correct. I don’t completely agree with her analysis; as Amy Welborn argues , Ms. Eberstadt is too quick to dismiss the role of the doctrine of celibacy in creating an…
Pragmatic Unicode
Unicode can be confusing. Here’s a “just the facts I need” presentation about how to handle it correctly.
How you eat corn on the cob predicts whether you're an analyst or algebraist
I like learning about odd connections between disparate things. This probably is the oddest example that I know. Broadly speaking, mathemat...
Everything's broken and nobody's upset
Software doesn't work. I'm shocked at how often we put up with it. Here's just ...