Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 7,746 posts.
“You wouldn’t want to be me.” is the line Elon Musk tells Joe Rogan about his life. Many of us see the successes and the outward experiences people produce and think up. Yet, few of us get to see what it’s like on the inside of that person’s body or day to day life. It […]
Culture, technology, & travel once or twice a week. Click to read Back to Humanity, a Substack publication.
This is our most EPIC post to date: two years of vanlife condensed into one article! Tales from the road, van talk, lessons learned, etc. MUST READ!
Haskell’s expressive type system means that type signatures can carry a lot of information. Haskell’s polymorphism means that you sometimes write functions that work across an enormous range of types, and are left wondering “what do I actually call my variables?”. It is often the case that there’s nothing to say…
The beauty of having a flexible schedule, when you are a freelancer, remote worker, or consultant, is being able to work whenever you like. When traveling, you can spend the whole day touring and working at night. Or maybe working in the morning and night, and enjoying the evenings. Whatever you want, it’s your call…
Update: a version of this post appeared on Slate.com. I seem to have touched a nerve with my rant about the conventional teaching of music theory and how poorly it serves practicing musicians. I th…
Back in mid-90s before anyone I knew had an Internet connection, a few of us had modems and would use them to call bulletin board systems via the phone line. On these systems what to me seemed the main thing was discussions and chat. For the first time I could talk to other like-minded people, and just being able to…
For the past two years, I’ve been on the receiving end of a passive aggressive win-back campaign from Dropbox. The feud originally started when I migrated away from Dropbox and hence canceled my subscription while leaving them saddled with over a terabyte of my data to carry forever, like a camel in the digital…
Excruciating. One phrase I often use to describe what it's like to read reference letters for Eastern European applicants to PhD and Master's programs in Cambridge. Even objectively outstanding students often receive dull, short, factual, almost negative-sounding reference letters. This is a result of (A)...
You spend the first part of your life trying to be old, trying to convince everyone that you're older than you are, that you're just as good...
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.
The code is not the point, but what if it’s the reason?
Montecristi Panama Hats, Men's, Women's, Fedoras, Foldable2023110 points48 commentsLife, Learning & Writing details
Grades of Quality of Panama Hats by Brent Black, the world's leading designer of fine quality Montecristi Panaman Hats.
When decisions are reversible, speed them up. The biggest risk is dragging your feet. When decisions are irreversible, slow them down. The biggest risk is making the wrong decision.
50+ mental model examples and their explanations. There are five categories: success, decision-making, biases, business, and human nature:
Here are some of the things I’m most proud of from 2019, and some of the biggest lessons I’ve learned.
I've been enjoying teaching Intelligent Systems again this semester. A big part of the fun is re-reading old papers. I had a lot of fun re-reading and thinking about the ideas in William Clancey 's classic paper, Heuristic Classification . Long-time readers may recall me mentioning this paper in a long-ago post about…
Several months ago I decided to bring my startup from Ottawa, Canada and exhibit in Startup Ally at TechCrunch Disrupt. What better place than Disrupt to absorb insight, meet visionaries and explor…
Nominations for fields that are not being researched as much as they should be
The year was 2007. I was a college student attending a 24-hour hackathon where we had had to build something on top of live trucking data. We were given an API that sent GPS and other metadata for 100 trucks roaming across Europe, the data updating every five seconds.
