Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,981 posts.
In Mindstorms I made the claim that children can learn to program and that learning to program can affect the way they learn everything else. I had in mind something like the process of re-empowerment of probability: the ability to program would allow a student to learn and use powerful forms of proba- bilistic ideas…
Hey! If you do front end development, you should know about CatchJS. It’s a JavaScript error logging service that doesn’t suck. Below is a graph over the amount of searches for AngularJ…
This is perhaps one of the most striking passages I have read for a while. It describes the modern world with startling accuracy. In our fear of an increasingly authoritarian rule, we have allowed …
After a considerable gap, a gave Go another go! The Problem As part of a consulting engagement, I accepted a project to devel...
It’s a huge surprise, and shows up in the most unlikely of places!
I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago in which I said macroeconomic collapse “may happen” and a few friends asked me why. To be clear, I don’t think it’s the likely outcome—I think we’ll find a way...
Richard Feynman's FBI file contains one very pointed, personal, anonymous attack. But can we figure out who wrote it from the context?
In this experiment, I wanted to see how good engineers and recruiters were at resume-based candidate filtering. Going into it, I was pretty sure that engineers would do a much better job than recruiters. However, that’s not what happened at all. As it turned out, people were pretty bad at filtering resumes across the…
After seeing a little spike in traffic on Analytics I did some further investigation. Lo and behold Websanova is tracking MLB.com!
Andy sent me a WSJ piece with Bill Gurley yesterday. I don’t like to link to paid content so here’s a good Business Insider summary of the article that is open for anyone to read. Regular readers know that I’m a huge fan of Bill’s. He’s as smart as they come and I generally agree with him […]
We have excellent tools to create and edit text (vim, emacs, sublime, etc.). We have pretty good tools to create and edit tabular data (excel, other spreadsheet software). We even have pretty good …
The Fermi Paradox: There should be 100,000 intelligent alien civilizations in our galaxy — so why haven't we found any of them?
I recently heard a story about a friend-of-a-friend who had a decent consulting career. Instead of leveraging his skills to make as much money as possible, he took a different approach. Each year he would accept consulting projects starting in January. His skills were in demand and so he was able to work extended…
There was a recent thread about the Apple 1’s noisy -5 volt supply on Applefritter , so I asked Woz the following:
Pipelines are an extremely useful (and surprisingly underused) architectural pattern in modern software engineering. The concept of using pipes and filters) to control the flow of data through...
What was the first thing you saw in Go that surprised you?
International Paid Agriculture Exchange Programs2014222 points131 commentsCareer & Management details
CAEP international paid agriculture exchange programs.
Last week I wrote about Apple’s new default encryption policy for iOS 8. Since that piece was intended for general audiences I mostly avoided technical detail. But since some folks (and appar…
Using teaching -- via writing, speaking, and the like -- to sell more software.
Recently, after being awake for longer than I should have, I started thinking about methods of remembering the number of days in each month of the year. There is a rhyme for it, and a way to count on your knuckles, but these didn’t satisfy me. I wondered if there was a mathematical formula for the problem, and upon…
