Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 7,743 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
A hacker's guide to college
In most professions, a college degree is a prerequisite for a job, even if doing the job doesn’t strictly require one. Your degree is used as a proxy to figure out whether you’re qualified because there is no better measure: “Oh, he went to a good school, he must be smart. Let’s bring him in for an interview.”
How I got into MIT when I was 14
Hi guys! A few folks have asked what it was like to grow up outside the traditional academic route - here's a quick piece written for GHF (G...
The Value of Grey Thinking (2016)
Grey thinking works. Reality is all grey area. All of it. There are very few black and white answers and no solutions without second-order consequences.
Neurons outside the brain
The three brains in our body
Thoughts on Voice Interfaces
I’ve been working on the Consumer Voice Products team in Mozilla for about a year now. My primary project has been Firefox Voice , but our mandate is larger.
The Melancholy of Subculture Society
Internet links small groups, helping dissolve big groups; good, bad? But a bit sad.
Why is Inkwell stuck in review
I submitted Inkwell for iOS to Apple for review on April 21st. It has gone through numerous rejections, code changes, resubmissions, clarifications, one phone call, and one appeal to the review board, which I’m still waiting to hear back on.
Social Cache Busting
How do you ask questions that people don’t just hippopotamus?
The Sudoku Affair
Software design is a deliberate process, and requires deliberate effort.
Once in a Lifetime
Here is what might possibly be my single favorite song in the world:
How I Fail – Ian Goodfellow
Ian Goodfellow is a staff research scientist on the Google Brain team, where he leads a team of researchers studying adversarial techniques in AI. He was included in MIT Technology Review’s “35 und…
Attention to Detail
Software Executive, Presenter, Dad.
Don't Assume It's Difficult Until It Is
Algorithms, circle mazes, hex grids, masking, weaving, braiding, 3D and 4D grids, spheres, and more!
What’s Wrong with “Multiplication Is Repeated Addition”? (2008)
[Photo by Alejandra Mavroski.] Myrtle called it The article that launched a thousand posts…, and counting comments on this and several other blogs, that may not be too much of an exaggeration…
There are not enough BTUs
Y'all ready for it?
Dating: A mysterious constellation of facts
Are speed dating and network effects contradictory?
Working on an iPad Pro as my main computer
tl;dr I can do all of my programming and system admin work with an iPad Pro because I work on remote servers over ssh, and I prefer using the Unix/Linux command line.
Why I teach vim
The why of why people use vim has been covered fairly extensively, so I thought I would spend a little time explaining why I teach vim to my high school students, even in 2020. It all began when I …
Importance of muscle mass, strength and cardiorespiratory fitness for longevity
"If you have the aspiration of kicking ass when you're 85, you can't afford to be average when you're 50." —Peter Attia
Why I use the IBM Model M keyboard that is older than me
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…
My 2022 self was wrong about meditation, monitors, and sleep
Introduction When I read Richard Hanania’s Reflections on 2022 in which he listed a bunch of major topics he changed his mind about, I realized that I really admired him for doing this. Then, immediately afterwards, I thought “Wait, am I worse than Hanania? The person who made the entire twitter angry at him more…
That time when I accidentally social engineered myself to a film set
I spent the last week in Toronto in the Cpp North conference . It was so much fun just to hang around with people after such a long pause.My...
Story of Vitamin D Toxicity (2022)
How much Vitamin D should I take? This is still the looming question, and it’s time to address it. First, though, imagine that someone in a public forum online asked me, “How much metoprolol (a…