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
5117

Bicycle skills

A while back I wrote about learning things just-in-case or just-in-time. Some things you learn in case you need them in the future, and some things you learn as needed. How do you decide whether something is worth learning ahead of time, or whether it is best to learn if and when you need it?

5126

Some thoughts on writing

I see a lot of essays framed as writing advice which are actually thinly veiled descriptions of how someone writes that basically say "you should write how I write", e.g., people who write short posts say that you should write short posts . As with technical topics, I think a lot of different things can work and…

5127

Finding Love Optimally

Like many in operations research, my research interests often creep over into my everyday life. Since I work on scheduling issues, I get particularly concerned with everyday scheduling, to the consternation of my friends and family (“We should have left six minutes ago: transportation is now on the critical path!”)…