Most cited

Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 57 posts.

Life, Learning & Writing
2012
6

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…

13

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…

20

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…

21

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…

24

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…