The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 342 posts.
(File dated November 9, 1998) PREFACE: Another file from the same disk with the Nihilanth sketches, this one, if it is to believed, written the day after we shipped Half-Life. I do believe it because the file’s creation date is indeed November 9, 1998, and I am not l33t enough to know how to fake […]
“The decline of Stackoverflow” is now trending on reddit, and I started this post as a comment in the thread, but it got too long. I’m in the 0.01% (whichContinue reading
physics, history of science, pseudoscience, hoaxes, writing, education, skepticisism, humor, quotes, illusions, 3d stereo photography.
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
Notes on nootropics I tried, and my experiments
Not music nerds, obviously. I don’t know anything about music. I know there are letters but sometimes the letters have squiggles; I know an octave doubles in pitch; I know you can write a pop song with only four chords. That’s about it. The rest has always seemed completely, utterly arbitrary. Why do we have twelve…
[Note: despite how some people are spinning this, tobacco is still really really bad and you should not smoke it] I. Schizophrenics smoke. A lot. Depending on the study, about 60-80% of schizophren…
Transactions are mundane and commonplace. Have we forgotten why they're useful?
A quick, opinionated guide to retirement planning and investing for software people.
This post used to contain an early version of the introduction to my previous book, The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek. I’m now working on an updated iteration.
I’m one. We’re not exactly common on the ground; my profession, apparently not content with having excluded a whole gender, is mostly doing without the services of a couple of generations.
[Content note: this is pretty much a rehash of things I’ve said before, and that other people have addressed much more eloquently. My only excuse for wasting your time with it again is that S…
As a kid, I'd always wonder what it was about adults that made them so busy. What could they be possibly doing with all their time? After I (kinda) became one, it hit me. There's an alarmingly large list of things adults do that we never quite grasp until we're there.
From being a total ml noob to start using it at work
Commentary on How to Write Articles and Essays Quickly and Expertly by Stephen Downes. Online learning, e-learning, new media, connectivism, MOOCs, personal learning environments, new literacy, and more
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
Do you know what’s happening in this picture? Literally one of the most important events in human history.
The other day I set up a new OpenBSD instance with a nice RAID array, encrypted with Full Disk Encryption. And promptly proceeded to forget part of the passphrase.
Math professor David Edwards sent me this short essay on mathematical education. Printed with his permission. The Math Myth Themath myth is the myth that the future of the American economy is dependent upon the masses having higher mathematics skills. This myth goes back to at least Sputnik, when the Russians were…
The artificial construction of reality was to play a key role in the new form of global intelligence which would soon emerge among human beings. If the group brain's "psyche" were a beach with shifting dunes and hollows, individual perception would be that beach's grains of sand. However this image has a hidden snag …
