The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 369 posts.
Last year, Noah Smith proposed his Two Paper Rule: If you want me to read the vast literature, cite me two papers that are exemplars and paragons of that literature. Foundational papers, key recent innovations – whatever you like (but no review papers or summaries). Just two. I will read them. If these two papers […]
Not because there aren’t people who actually enjoy working in an open office, there are. Quite a few, actually. But they’re in the distinct minority. The vast majority of people either dislike the …
I often recommend F-Droid to my Android-using friends. F-Droid is an alternative app store which contains only Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). It's great because the apps are almost all not evil. Did you know that a flashlight app doesn't need access to your contacts, location, and pictures? Did you know that…
I first got online in 1993, back when the Web had a capital letter — three, in fact — and long before irony stretched its legs and unbuttoned its flan
Every now and again, someone emails me and asks for very general advice. ("How do I change the world?") With the caveat that I've only lived a fraction of one life, and am still trying to figure things out, here's the advice I'd give past me.
Douglas Hofstadter's book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is a classic text that's had a strong influence on countle...
One day in the mid-1920s, a Moscow newspaper reporter named Solomon Shereshevsky entered the laboratory of the psychologist Alexander Luria. Shereshevsky's boss at the newspaper had noticed that Shereshevsky never needed to take any notes, but somehow still remembered all he was told, and had suggested he get his…
CS50 launches three new courses that go beyond the original course and teach Python, Javascript, React, and Game Development
Towards the end of last year, I got a new laptop: the Purism Librem 13. It replaced the Lenovo ThinkPad X250 that I was using previously, which maxed out at 8 GB RAM and was beginning to be unusabl…
How to deal with ideological censorship in a community? Who gets empathy and who is humanized the most? Does contemporary rhetoric about toxicity hold up to scrutiny? “When you keep rewarding…
There was a time when search engines were a thing. And it seems they still are
The last primary keyboard I’ll use in my life might be the IBM Model M. It’ll probably last me the decades to the day that keyboards should become obsolete. - Kheng Meng, 2018 I just had to start my blog post with that self quote ^^^ but I’m pretty confident it’ll hold true for me. I have owned several keyboards so…
In 2005, I cofounded Y Combinator, the first "accelerator." Today there are hundreds of them all over the world, but in 2005 what we were doing was so unusual that most people in Silicon Valley...
The belief that interests arrive fully formed and must simply be “found” can lead people to limit their pursuit of new fields and give up when they encounter challenges, according to a new Stanford study.
Five years ago I realized that I remembered almost nothing about most books that I read. I was reading all kinds of non-fiction - pop-psychology, pop-economics, pop-sociology, you name it - and felt like quite the polymath auto-didact. But one day, after I had finished blathering at a friend about how much I had…
Software development blog of Joe Wright
Are you bored with programming? Why not teach it. It’s not enough to speak in mumbo jumbo such as polymorphism, multithreading, typescript, blah blah these words mean nothing to people who don’t know programming.
I planted a yam in a large basket like enclosure and then 6 months later harvested, cooked and ate it. My previous attempts at growing yams were stymied by wild pigs and scrub turkeys. On learning …
I've used Macs as my primary computing devices my entire life. And though I continue to use a Mac for my primary workstation for both work and personal projects, my use of computers has evolved in the past few years quite a bit. With more of my stuff moving into the cloud and fewer software applications being…
In our first week, we were told that the RC faculty wanted to do one thing above else – to remove any obstacles in the way of us becoming dramatically better programmers .
It's not my job to be a behavioral economist; my job is to actually popularize behavioral economics. The interesting thing to me—as someone who has a brother who's an academic—is that academics, however brilliant, are the worst marketers in the world. And there's a reason for this, which is they, of course, possibly…
