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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 7,740 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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You can just say it
There is a weird collection of arguments for appraising the value of humans and their creative artifacts. It usually goes something like this: In the age of AI, we should still prefer humans in certain roles because AI could never perform the tasks required for that role. Or, a human can at least do it better. Or…
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From novice to master, and back again (2013)
In 1985, I was a freshman at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. The college had a VAX 11/780 running 4.2BSD and a PDP-11/70 running v7 with some Berkeley and local code hacked in. It was my first exper…
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We live in an age of distractions, dealing with constant mental stimulus
Yet another calm weekend after months of lockdowns and I sit down to enjoy a book. After turning a couple of pages, I'm no longer able to keep going. In-between, I've managed to look at my phone four times and I've had my thoughts wander away. Why does something so simple feel suddenly so difficult?
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Troubleshooting: A skill that never goes obsolete
Much of what I do, in multiple fields, could be reduced to one skill: troubleshooting. I’ll define troubleshooting as systematically determining the cause of unwanted behaviour in a system, and fixing it. Troubleshooting is often learned tacitly, in the process of explicitly learning “the skill”. Troubleshooting is…
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What Is The Morning Writing Effect?
Many writers anecdotally report they write best first thing early in the morning, apparently even if they are not morning people. Do they, and why?
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I wrote a small piece on planned death
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
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Tallest Lego building with 4 pieces?
My daughter asked me: “Daddy, what’s the tallest structure we can build with those 4 pieces?”
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How to Exist
Here’s an experiment for a true daredevil. Sit there for a three minutes, following two rules:
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Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket
I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that you, like me, have a large pile (or digital equivalent) of books or articles you've been meaning to get around to reading, plus maybe a long queue of podcast episodes to which you'd love to listen, if only you had the time. It's the archetypal "first-world problem", I…
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Lessons in creating family photos that people want to keep (2018)
As a consequence of scanning thousands of slides, I learned quite a bit about taking photos that capture a family’s life. Here’s a personal…
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Think Bayes: Bayesian Statistics Made Simple (2012)
This HTML version of Think Bayes is provided for convenience, but it is not the best format for the book. In particular, some of the math symbols are not rendered correctly.
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Compound pejoratives on Reddit
What can Reddit comment data tell us about the rules governing the formation of insulting compound words like 'fartface', 'scumwad', or 'assgoblin'?
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To learn a new language, read its standard library
The best way to learn a new programming language, just like a human language, is from example. To learn how to write code you first need to read someone else’s code. But who is the best person to learn from? Which code should we read? Where should we look to find it?
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U+237C ⍼ Is Azimuth
One year ago, on 28 February 2025, Wikipedia user Moyogo updated the page for Angzarr with a citation to the type foundry H. Berthold AG’s 1950 symbol catalogue listing ⍼ as Azimut, Richtungswinkel , or “azimuth”, “direction angle”. Mystery solved!
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I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)
A note from the author This is an older version of this story, from 2007. Here's the latest version, from 2022. Tim already had his bag and overcoat on and his keys in his hand and was about to leave when Diane stopped him at the door. "I just got this thing working....
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Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system
Announcing my latest open-source project.
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Why vampires live forever
The modern longevity movement's obsession with blood transfusions makes perfect sense — if you accept that Peter Thiel and Bryan Johnson are vampires.
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I deleted my social media accounts
Retrogames revised.
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Timezone Bullshit
People often use short timezone abbreviations like EST and PST to refer to timezones. If you're doing this in a computer program, you are almost certainly making a huge mistake. Let's take take a look, using the disastrously bad unix libc timezone tools , which you're almost certainly using under the hood if you're…
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Fifty
So, it has finally happened. I just turned 50 and I can’t say it was something I was looking forward to. First the good news: today seems to be a day like any other so if you’re younger than I am, from the far side of the great divide, I’m happy to inform you that there is nothing that feels abruptly different. The…
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What it's like to be cancelled
An honest look at what it looks like to be cancelled, one year after it happened. A hopeful yet realistic message for everyone.