The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 7,743 posts.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
New research that was recently published in Frontiers in Psychology provides important insights regarding the connection between sleep quality and the tendency to procrastinate .
A change starts with a story.
My first real job was in advertising. I worked as a copywriter for an agency called Benton & Bowles in New York City. An artist or entrepreneur's first job inevitably bends the twig. It shapes who you'll become. If your freshman outing is in journalism, your brain gets tattooed (in a good way) with…
Harris Kenny, founder of OutboundSync. A little ode to a computing journey.
At least year’s Bridges Conference in Stockholm, I attended a short presentation by Susan Goldstine about “self-diagramming lace” . As motivation for the new work she was presenting, Susan referenced her paper from the year before on what she calls “symmetry samplers” . Samplers are an old tradition in fibre arts. A…
Before our kids learned to talk, I would play tickles with them. I would make tickling gestures as I moved towards them, they would start giggling a little, then I would tickle them and they would laugh. We'd continue until they seemed to be done with the game, and then we'd move on to something else. As they got…
UPDATE 4: My original MSDN blog content, minus the comments, has been archived publicly on the MSDN site; thanks again to Scott and Dan and everyone else who made this happen. Why minus the comment…
The principle of charity is a philosophical principle that denotes that, when interpreting someone’s statement, you should assume that the best possible interpretation of that statement is the one that the speaker meant to convey. Accordingly, to implement the principle of charity, you should not attribute falsehoods…
Last week the FDA approved esketamine for treatment-resistant depression. Let’s review how the pharmaceutical industry works: a company discovers and patents a potentially exciting new drug. …
David shares how the new age of information abundance is transforming commerce, education, and politics. Read here.
A couple years ago, I used an old Thinkpad while my MacBook was being repaired. I enjoyed the experience so much that I ended up getting a Thinkpad X62 (an X61 chassis with modern internals). Last S…
I purchased an iPad Pro with the Smart Keyboard and Pencil to use as my main computer. Can it replace my local workstation? Is it powerful enough for my day-to-day tasks? Let's find out.
E very friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro, 1 [1] you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.”
Gwern has answered my prayers and taught GPT-2 poetry. GPT-2 is the language processing system that OpenAI announced a few weeks ago. They are keeping the full version secret, but have released a s…
Does anyone else get too absorbed in side projects that you forget about life
So, about a decade ago I wrote an essay on this blog about the writing of the Merchant Princes series (at that point, six slim novels—the Empire Games follow-on trilogy wasn't more than a daydream back then), in which I tried to pin down what I'd learned about writing a series.
For many years I’ve interacted with my fellow humans, I think perhaps more than any other way, via the medium of Internet chat. But in my chat window, they’re fading, one by one. This problem is technical and personal and I felt it ought not to go unrecognized.
This Christmas, like every other, I traveled to northern Wisconsin to stay with my parents on the dairy farm I grew up on.
The story of an unusual career transition.
I have a friend who’s creating an awesome side project: LED signs that you can control to let your coworkers know you’re busy.…
Lambdaclass's blog about distributed systems, machine learning, compilers, operating systems, security and cryptography.
Developer and Author from Austin, TX.
When I was growing up in a suburb of Austin, Texas, the neighbor across the street had a small flock of backyard hens that were a…
