Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 7,740 posts.
On July 1st I discovered a puddle of liquid mercury in our house. It was the evening before the holiday weekend and I was preparing to do some more demolition for the bathroom I've been working on. I was putting down plastic to make cleanup easier, and when I got to the corner there was a dusty little puddle. That…
Looking foolish is underrated.
I collect music by buying physical CDs, digitizing them with Exact Audio Copy , and scanning the artwork. This is sometimes challenging if the CD was self-published in a limited run in a foreign country ten years ago. It is very challenging if the CDs have an innate defect that renders some tracks unreadable.
I always thought I was too dumb to understand math. During my school years, it was evident to me that for some kids math was easy, and for others like myself: painfully difficult.
OR: why your brain needs a boxcutter
What is now known as the Slug Algorithm for rendering fonts directly from Bézier curves on the GPU was developed in the Fall of 2016, so this year marks a full decade since its inception. I published a paper in JCGT about the technique in the middle of 2017, and my company sold the first license for version 1.0 of the…
I've befriended some of the most thoughtful, brilliant, curious, eccentric, and sincere people I've ever met in the tech industry. Many of my dearest friends...
We can admit our knowledge gaps without devaluing our expertise.
This is the text version of a talk I gave on September 14, 2015, at the FREMTIDENS INTERNET conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.
I was recently diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis . It is an autoimmune disorder where your body’s normally helpful antibodies start acting strangely . This leads to inflammation in the brain. This blog briefly discusses some of my experience and prognosis.
An exploration into customizing LLMs for personal use
Scott Chacon is CEO of the online language learning company Chatterbug.
Live chat is for things that can get lost.
When you write a document or essay, you are posing a question and then answering it. For example, a PRD answers the question, “What should we build?” A technical spec answers, “How should we build it?” Sometimes the question is more difficult to answer—“What are we even trying to accomplish?” And with every attempt at…
It is 18 feet wide at the widest point and about 13 feet tall. It feels very spacious for it’s 209 square foot floor.
One afternoon in Portland, I walked into World Cup & Tea to do some work. Instead, I had an encounter with the guy who invented the computer: Russell Kirsch
Please let me unlink my Facebook account
Richard Stallman has had a rough month. This article is a decent summary of the events. In short: Stallman made some technically-correct-but-utterly-tactless comments on a private mailing list, most…
Nearly ten years ago I graduated with a degree in Mathematics & Computing, with a keen interest in pursuing a career involving maths and programming, but with little idea how. First and foremost I had decided to stay in Manchester after uni, rather than risk getting stuck at my parents' if I moved...
We've got the wrong theory about how minds work and it's ruining our lives
Phone addiction is a huge problem, here is what the research and statistics say. Follow these tips to overcome phone addiction.
focusing after dark • corn cob bulbs • before + after photos • saving ½–2h/day • my setup • why don’t more people do this?! • FAQs
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
