Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 7,746 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
I almost quit caffeine in one year
A holding company for strategic investments
Potato diet community trial
In French, the word for potato is pomme de terre. This literally translates to apple of the earth. By this logic, potatoes are the lowest-hanging fruit of all. More seriously: We keep getting more …
Handbrewing Coffee
I like to brew my coffee by hand.
How to Teach Math?
The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics—Paul Halmos Angie Hodge is an Associate Professor of mathematics at Northern Arizona University. Her interests as stated on her website …
I’ve been reading a whole lot about tomatoes
Hello there, I'm betting that you need a break from curve flattening, and disinfectants, and Twitter, and Slack, and Zoom, and asking if people can see your...
Tragically, as many as 9625 out of every 10k individuals may be neurotypical
Neurotypical syndrome is a neurobiological disorder characterized by preoccupation with social concerns, delusions of superiority, and obsession with conformity.
Why 'gallons per mile' is better than 'miles per gallon'
Why we should really be quoting fuel consumption figures as 'gallons per mile' and not 'miles per gallon'.
My First Piano
Being a trained pianist brings its own interesting challenge when it comes to your instrument… because it’s actually quite rare that the piano you play on is actually your instrument. Keyboard players are amongst the few musicians who rarely choose the instrument they play on. Whether at home, at
If you die in the game, you die in real life
Today is November 6th, 2022, the day of the SAO Incident. Thousands of VRMMORPG gamers were trapped by a mad scientist inside a death game that could only be escaped through completion. If their …
What’s the point of tech conferences?
It’s con season in the tech world. Yesterday evening I flew from Pluralsight’s Link/ unconference in New Orleans to Pycon US in Salt Lake City. New Orleanians are just as likely as not …
How to prepare for losing your programming job
Another week has passed, and another 3 million people in the US have filed for unemployment. While the current situation hasn’t impacted programming jobs quite as much, it’s just a matter of time before the economic damage hits most everywhere. There will be layoffs, and plenty of them, and occasionally whole…
How I built this website on a Raspberry Pi
A comprehensive tutorial on how to build a personal professional website on a Raspberry Pi.
Why I don't write about programming and why it's not really worthwhile to do so
In a recent Stack Overflow podcast episode , Joel Spolsky mentioned that he’s probably going to formally end his popular Joel on Software blog next month.
Japanese Words in Neuromancer
This is a reblog/translation of a post by Héctor García… During the 80s in the United States, Japan was started to be seen as the inevitable first economic power of the world. It went from be…
How I Backup
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.
Please be dying, but not too quickly, part 2: The patient's perspective
The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing: from investigator calls to taking back (almost) all the bad things I've ever said about New Jersey
Work on unimportant problems
It seems obvious that some problems are important to solve and some aren't, as in, curing cancer is more important than delivering social gaming. Often, people lament the abundance of tech firms working on ultimately unimportant stuff, and advise to work on important problems and not just chase the money.
The secret lives of snowblowers
Yes, they throw snow. But the mechanical design of residential snowblowers is more interesting than it seems.
The importance of offtopic
My first big job in the industry had me as one of two people in Warsaw, with the rest of the team in Oslo. I’ve never seen any of my Norwegian co-workers at that point, but one the first pieces of direct feedback I got from my manager was: “the teammembers like you; they feel like you’re part of the team.”
A Codebase Is an Organism (2014)
Here's what no one tells you when you graduate with a degree in computer science and take up a job in software engineering:
“Your program is stupid. It doesn't work,” my wife told me (2010)
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The emotional trial of clinical trials: like online dating with death risk
Part 1 is mostly about what happened as Bess and I raced against tumor growth to find a new clinical trial that might keep me alive. Part 2 is here, and it is mostly about how this process feels an…
Inspired by the 180 websites I will understand 52 academic papers in 52 weeks
Hi 👋 you're reading a pretty old post! I started writing on here back in high school and this page may not reflect my current views. Recommend checking out related articles and categories down below, I've likely published more recent thoughts on this topic.
Don't Waste a Single Moment
I’ve embarked on a new adventure as CEO & Cofounder of Referly – a startup that is helping anyone earn rewards for referring products they love and generat...