4501
My Parents Give Me $28k a Year
Not long ago, my wife, a composer, asked me if I would ever advise a student from a low-income family to pursue a career in the arts. “What do you mean? Of course.” “Really?” “If that’s what they w…
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 7,743 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
4502
The Surprising Power of the Long Game
In everything we do, we play the long or the short game. The short game is easy, pleasurable, and offers visible and immediate benefits. But it almost never leads to success. Here's how to play the long game.
4503
Focus on your own shit (2016)
Check Product Hunt. Ahh, crap. Someone just launched an app similar to my product (and we’re still in beta).
4504
Foundations of ML and AI: Book recommendations
Here's what I recommend to programmers if they want to understand machine learning. Six fantastic books that you can work with in your spare time to build yo...
4505
4506
4507
Better Genderless Pronouns in English
Writing or speaking English, we always face a conundrum when we need a pronoun to refer to a person without specifying gender. Previously we needed a way to cover both male and female; nowadays some people state that they don't want to be considered either of those, and I believe in respecting their wishes.
4508
4509
The Chamber of Guf
[I briefly had a different piece up tonight discussing a conference, but the organizers asked me to hold off on writing about it until they’ve put up their own synopsis. It will be back up ev…
4510
Asterix in Translation: The Genius of Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge
As promised in a previous blog entry, what follows is a discussion of the translation of some of my favourite Asterix gags. The translators’ modus operandi was to include as many jokes in the Engli…
4511
4512
Dear Spotify, please let me unlink my Facebook account
Please let me unlink my Facebook account
4513
The Big List of RPG Plots
What follows is a scrap of trivia . . . my collection of RPG plots , in abstract form. I built this by examining the premises of hundreds o...
4514
Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career
This post is not meant to be prescriptive. It’s also not intended to be another “Quitting Google to pursue my passion for X” article because, well, I haven’t been able to pass the interview there yet. This is a telling of my story that I hope will inspire those who are thinking about quitting to take the leap.
4515
4516
4517
Today Is My Wife’s First Birthday Since She Died
Some advice about love & death followed by a meandering eulogy.
4518
A Year in Clojure
A lot has changed since my last post nearly a year ago. I want to write about my experience coming from a ML-family language to a Lisp. It’s not very informa...
4519
On the Law of Diminishing Specialization
On Productive Technology and its Discontents Recently, I’ve been dipping in and out of Edward Tenner’s provocative 1996 book, When Things Bites Back. In following ... Read more
4520
4521
Flocking
Have you ever watched a school of fish, a flock of birds, or even a crowd of people and watched how they move?
4522
The Best Article Ever Written About Bragging
After feeling belittled, I journey into the heart of bragging and discover 17 modes of showing off.
4523
4524
4525
Questions
Some questions that I find interesting. I've omitted some that are related to Stripe. ( Pointers to interesting readings on these topics are always welcome, as are pointers to responses.)
4526
Solving My Email Problem
Email is not a messaging protocol. It’s a TODO list. Or at least my inbox is a TODO list and email is the protocol for putting stuff on it. Here’s the problem. It is a s**tty TODO list. Any one of you can put something on my TODO list. And I don’t want that.
4527
4528
This blog has moved
As of September 2018, I am moving Probably Overthinking It to a new location . Blogger has been an excellent host; so far, this blog has ...
4529
What I Learned from a Taipei Alley
I was in Taipei the past few weeks working on a documentary with friends. Because of a busy schedule, it wasn't like my usual travels abroad for fun, it felt more like a work trip. Still, even if I'd been there purely for vacation, I would've wanted to try a different mode of travel, one less focuse
4530
App update rejected for mentioning iPhone XR in release notes
On September 12, 2018, Apple Inc. — you may have heard of them — held a big event at their Cupertino headquarters (Spanish for “ What pert headquarters! ”) to announce the latest models of their utterly beloved nightmare machine: the iPhone XR, the iPhone XS, and the iPhone XS Max. I’m seriously not making up that…