The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 7,743 posts.
A very, very long time ago, there was a star. It was much more massive than the star that lights our sky, around twenty times as massive. It was composed almost entirely of hydrogen, as was most of the universe when it was formed. Gravity collected its hydrogen together, and gravity compressed the hydrogen fuel at its…
[Spoiler warning for The Silmarillion] I. The Silmarillion describes the fate of the three Silmarils. Earendil kept one, and traveled with it through the sky, where it became the planet Venus. Maed…
Tavish Armstrong has a great document where he describes how and when he learned the programming skills he has . I like this idea because I've found that the paths that people take to get into programming are much more varied than stereotypes give credit for, and I think it's useful to see that there are many possible…
The cleverness of an idea is proportionate to its odds of failure. Brian Kernighan once said that “debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” I have built many things that I wasn’t…
I’ve struggled with insomnia for all of my adult life. It began in college and has waxed and waned in severity ever since, correlating with stress levels…
1/ After 10+ years of publishing professional writing at https://t.co/ddc2F89IIV , I have a couple opinions on how to get your stuff read
Ranked a top 100 research university, VCU is a place where discovery and creativity go hand in hand. Located in downtown Richmond, Virginia, its more than 200 programs emphasize hands-on learning, creativity and engaging in the world around us.
[2018 Update: After posting this article and making it to the top of r/programming and HackerNews sales of the book increased noticeably. The book is now nic...
This page has been moved to http://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~dwjones/making/book/index.shtml
Every Frame a Painting is officially dead. Nothing sinister; we just decided to end it.
Read Elliot Temple's essay about Taking Children Seriously.
If and when you emerged from your happiness bubble to read the news, you’ll have seen (at least if you live in the US) that the cruel and reckless tax bill has passed the House of Representat…
I've an unhealthy amount of smart gadgets at home. Enough so that it's worth running an orientation session when friends come to visit. This is what the Alexa does, here's which light switches not to use, don't be scared if the Roomba attacks. That sort of thing. I don't know how long we'll live in this place. It's…
In early October I gave a keynote at Python Brasil in Belo Horizonte. Here is an aspirational and lightly edited transcript of the talk. There is …
About two years ago, I switched from taking my personal car to the airport, to hailing Ubers and Lyfts. The math of it was pretty simple: Uber was cheaper than paying for my driving and parking*. A…
GTD—or “Getting things done”—is a framework created by David Allen for organizing and tracking your tasks and projects. Its aim is a bit higher than just “getting things done”, though. (It should have been called “Getting things done in a much better way than just letting things happen, which often turns out not to be…
