The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 7,743 posts.
There’s a scene in Moneyball in which Brad Pitt’s character, the manager of the Oakland A’s , is watching a recording of one of his players trying so hard to run fast that he stumbles and falls. Lying on the ground he’s angry at himself, because he doesn’t realize that right before he started his run he hit a home run…
A note from the author This is an older version of this story, from 2007. Here's the latest version, from 2022. Tim already had his bag and overcoat on and his keys in his hand and was about to leave when Diane stopped him at the door. "I just got this thing working....
Collection of odds and ends relating to e-readers including personal reminisces Background # Reading has been a huge part of my life. The written word has had arguably more of an impact on my life than anything I have experienced in person. As a kid back in early 2000’s; this meant a lot of library trips and saving…
You might know that I've posted funny emails I've received on my blog several times in the past. The kind of emails people send me when they experience problems with some device they own (like a car) and they contact me because my email address happens to be visible somewhere. People sometimes say I should … Continue…
Authoritarian muscle memory and the twists and turns of lying
Few upwardly mobile people in the modern rat-race society can live without an alarm clock. With a shot of strong coffee and round-the-clock stress, most people learn to live and survive with an alarm clock. Half of the population wakes up with an alarm, 9% are woken by a partner, 4% by pets, 3% by children, etc. That…
Type checking is the process of taking a given program in some programming language and working out whether all variables and expressions have the correct types, i.e. strings are assigned to strings, arithmetic expressions involve only numbers, etc. Some languages also offer type inference , tasking the compiler with…
I recently realized that I have been wasting my time on a dumb effort for the last 35 years. It all started back in 1983. My game for the Atari, Eastern Front (1941), had been a big hit, and Dale Yocum of the Atari Program Exchange suggested that I release the source code for it. This was an exciting idea, as nobody…
Some thoughts on the New York Times' Slate Star Codex profile
One of the constant refrains which has bemused me during the pandemic is all the people saying how much kids want to go back to school.
Around 2015, I started to realize that I was no longer part of Apple's target audience. I've since found that Windows, and the devices available on the Windows side, from gaming laptops to convertibles to custom-built PCs, are just a better match for my requirements.
Packing up the household for a recent move, I was delving into shoeboxes, photo albums, and file folders that had not been opened in decades. One of my discoveries, found in an envelope at the back of a file drawer, was the paper sleeve from a drinking straw, imprinted with a saccharine message:
People often use short timezone abbreviations like EST and PST to refer to timezones. If you're doing this in a computer program, you are almost certainly making a huge mistake. Let's take take a look, using the disastrously bad unix libc timezone tools , which you're almost certainly using under the hood if you're…
One of the repeating motifs of recruiting in the software industry are mantras of “talent”: “We recruit the best talent”, “talent attracts talent”, “we value talent” and so on. Some companies have so called “head of talent”, “talent acquisition”, “talent development” professionals on their payroll - basically a…
How I am using 50+ sources of my personal data
What does running a medical database teach you about why everything sucks?
Chemotherapy after colon cancer at age 34
A world beyond Amazon
To answer this question, let me take you a few years back, when I worked with a small high tech startup. We were working on a pretty complex augmented reality system spanning all layers from low-level computer vision components to cross-platform mobile and web apps. Especially for the lower-level components, a good…
Usable Security, Human-Computer Interaction & AI, from a UNIX perspective.
I’ve been part of the internet startup scene for a while. There are so many different camps: the bootstrappers, the VC-backed tech-bros, the crypto “investor...
The default state of the world is that things are inefficient, that 20% of the effort put in results in 80% of the output. This is a fundamental part of how I see the world, and this post outlines how I have internalised this idea, and how to pursue the clever hacks that can make things better
The first thing I wanted to learn more about was UNIX since Linux is a UNIX-like operating system. I also never really felt that I fully understood what exactly UNIX was, besides being a family of fairly similar operating systems.
In the 1950s, a shady outfit called Obetrol Pharmaceuticals made a popular over-the-counter diet pill called Obetrol...
To realize your potential you have to focus on the things that matter. You have to say no to good opportunities so you can pursue great ones.
WhatsApp's rise and recent PR efforts highlight a class of business models that I call "user domestication".
[updates: here’s the paper, and here’s Robin’s brief response to some of the comments here] This month Robin Hanson, the famous and controversy-prone George Mason University econo…
