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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 333 posts.
A Long, Ugly Year of Depression That’s Finally Fading
Yesterday morning I woke up early to speak at the Business of Software conference in Boston. It was my first time there, and it's an exceptional group.
How to buy a tank: a BRDM-2 story
Your life is the best story! Just start your blog today!
Melting aluminum
Today another in my ongoing, seldom-updated series of posts about building my own backyard foundry. Today I’ll describe how the final step works: actually melting and pouring the metal. First…
Generative eBook Covers
Here at NYPL Labs we’re working on an ebook-borrowing and reading app. This post explores automated ways for creating covers for public-dom…
Things That Sometimes Help If You Have Depression
Some of my friends have depression and have asked me for some suggestions. These will be inferior to reading official suggestions, but you will probably not read official suggestions, and you may r…
The Wolf
You’ve heard of the 10x engineer, but I am here to tell you about the Wolf. They are an engineer, and they consistently exhibit the following characteristics:
My year with a distraction-free iPhone
In 2012, I realized I had a problem: Infinity in my pocket was too much.
What Should a 4 Year Old Know? (2010)
It’s back to school time and children all over are starting preschool. Many parents are frantically searching the internet to find out if their little ones are “on track” and kno…
Deconstructing Finnish
Now and then, as I continue trying to improve my Finnish language kyky (ability), I decide it’s high time that I actually understand the...
Mitch Hedberg and GIS
Thinking about this, I realized we could use GIS to find the number of La Quintas that are next to Denny’s. Last night after the kids were asleep, I sat down with a beer (Sierra Nevada) and figured out how I could get the data and perform the calculation.
Spaced Repetition is Awesome
I've recently become motivated to learn Portuguese. Mulheres bonitas sao muito motivado. It's not the first time this has happened to me - in the past I've attempted to learn Spanish, Farsi and Konkani. But it is the first time I've made significant progress and it's the first time that I …
The most common errors in undergraduate mathematics
This page describes the errors that I have seen most frequently in undergraduate mathematics, the likely causes of those errors, and their remedies.
How to Beat Procrastination
Part 2. Where does a procrastinator go wrong and how can you actually improve your procrastination habits?
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The origins of the use of [x] in UI design.
My Experience at YC Hacks
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. At 33 years old, I knew I’d probably be older than the vast majority of the 400+ people attending Y Combinator’s first YC Hacks hackathon. But other than that, I didn’t have many expectations. YC Hacks was my first real hackathon. Many years ago, I went to the …