The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 7,740 posts.
Yesterday I shared a little program called Mark V. Shaney Junior at github.com/susam/mvs . It is a minimal implementation of a Markov text generator inspired by the legendary Mark V. Shaney program from the 1980s. Mark V. Shaney was a synthetic Usenet user that posted messages to various newsgroups using text…
One of my wife's guilty pleasures is reality TV, usually ones centred around dating - the more American, the better. By extension, I absorb some of this noise and I'm happy to admit I can sometimes get invested.
One of the things I do when I'm feeling blue is to make a mental list of the nice things people have done for me over the years, including perfect strangers.
A new anonymous essay published every day in December in the countdown to Christmas.
Recently, people have been asking me why I’m pausing Boo to work on a programming language. I think it would actually be cool to write down how I feel.
You know what they say in the world of products: fast, cheap, good; pick two. That's exactly my experience when trying to find the most suitable wood finish for my hand carved wooden spoons and cups. I got tired of trying to find something food-safe, without chemical smells and that doesn't take ages to cure. So I…
Here are ten things I learnt about public speaking.
There's this genuine repulsion I feel when people talk about a future where death by old age is no longer a thing. Something very deep within me just says "no, absolutely not", and I've been trying to figure out why.
An article from dylanbeattie.net
For the last two years I’ve had an O’Reilly subscription . Their offer is quite attractive with unlimited access to books not only by O’Reilly but also Manning and others. The catalog is just enourmous and covers pretty much every technical book around software engineering et al. that I might ever want to read. There…
How to get people to NOT contact you
The one constant that I have observed in my professional life is that people underestimate the need to move fast. Of course, doing good work takes time. I once spent six months writing a URL parser. But the fact that it took so long is not a feature, it is not a positive, it is … Continue reading Why speed matters
I once worked at a company which had an enormous amount of technical debt - millions of lines of code, no unit tests, and products using l...
A special appeal to support Res Obscura on its Crystal Anniversary
A friend recently asked how to get started watching Gundam, and as I tripped all over myself, equal parts excitement and not wanting to sound like a
When I was younger, I really liked programming! I loved the sense of accomplishment, I loved the problem solving, I loved sharing what I made with the people around me to both amuse and assist.
What was the key to successfully learning to drive, ride a bike, or speak a foreign language? Confidence, and it’s every bit as important in computing, and in macOS.
Unlike a lot of places in tech, my company, Set Studio/Piccalilli has no outside funding. Bootstrapped is what the LinkedIn people say, I think. It’s been a hard year this year. A very hard year. I think a naive person would blame it all on the seemingly industry-wide attitude of “AI can just do this […]
I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels Apple’s quality is degrading. I spend 10 hours a day on my laptop and would spend any amount of money within reason for a better one. However, everything comes with tradeoffs.
More than a decade ago, when I was applying to graduate school, I went through a period of deep uncertainty. I had tried the previous year and hadn’t gotten in anywhere. I wanted to try again, but …
Among a few other integral tricks and techniques, Feynman's trick was a strong reason that made me love evaluating integrals, and although the technique itself goes back to Leibniz being commonly known as the Leibniz integral rule, it was Richard Feynman who popularized it, which is why it is also referred to as…
I haven't published since April because I've been afraid. What was I afraid of? In this post I detail every single thing I've avoided admitting on this blog.
I recently had an engaging conversation with Alex ( @veqq ) from the Lobsters community about computing, mathematics and a range of related topics. Our conversation was later published on the community website as Lobsters Interview with Susam .
Interruptions, recovery time, and task size: three numbers that determine if you'll get real work done. Interactive visualizations show the math behind bad days.
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flow2 | Blog post: 'On 10 Years of Writing a Blog Nobody Reads' in Personal
A year ago I decided to help build a service business for my mom because I wanted to learn about marketing and business. One of the largest blindspots engineers have is around sales and marketing. I was determined to not fall into this trap, but marketing seemed like a skill I couldn’t just learn by […]
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
A couple of weeks ago, I decided to do away with my Netflix subscription. I simply was barely using it, and whenever I did it was more ou...
