Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 342 posts.
On the Wildness of Children
The Revolution Will Not Take Place in a Classroom
Ways to get motivated when you don’t feel like working
Every week I write up to three new articles like this one. And every week I struggle to find the motivation to get started on each article. On Sunday night I make my to do list for the week ahead, and think about how quickly I'll get to work on this week's articles. But by Monday morning I'm struggling...
I love my Amazon Workspace
Early last year my colleague Steve Mueller stopped by my office to tell me about an internal pilot program that he thought would be of interest to me. He explained that they were getting ready to run Amazon WorkSpaces on the Amazon network and offered to get me on the waiting list. Of course, being […]
Five hundred days using Ubuntu Phone
Today is my five hundredth day of using the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition exclusively as my mobile phone. This is a nice piece of hardware (go...
Is There Any Room for the Not-Passionate Developer?
A reflection on the software industry, on the place it leaves for non-passionate programmers, and the consequences
The Search for the Perfect To-do List
Beware the to-do list rabbit hole. It starts off with one or two innocent reminders and ends up with you tumbling down a long hole of procrastination in search of the perfect system. After many years of trying different software I’m glad to say that I’m finally climbing back out of the hole wearing a rather dashing…
Effective learning: Rules of formulating knowledge (1999)
This article will help you overcome one of the greatest difficulties you will face when trying to accelerate learning: formulating knowledge.
Quitting your job to pursue your passion is a privilege
The privileges of the self-employed, inspiring, brave, courageous entrepreneurial class that pursues their passion.
Design Principles for Reducing Cognitive Load
Every time you visit a website, a process of learning is initiated in the brain. Whether it’s the navigation, layout, or that auto-rotating image slider on the homepage, your brain has to learn how to use the site while keeping track of the reason you came there in the first place. The mental effort required during…
How and why I made a zine
How (and why) I made a zine
The Biggest Mistake I Ever Made
There was a time in my life when I played quite a bit of basketball. I was leading engineering at a start-up in Scottsdale, AZ, my wife was…
What Math Do You Need for Physics?
Chad Orzel has a very sensible piece at Forbes, headlined What Math Do You Need For Physics? It Depends, which addresses the question of what math a physicist like him (experimental AMO physics) re…
A VR Cycling Experience for $40
I’ve made an Arduino thing that can wirelessly talk to a mobile device over BLE and can now meter the revolutions of a wheel with an optical tachometer. I’m using these two hardware fea…
I'm Writing a Book on Security
I’m writing a book on security in the highly connected Internet-of-Things world. Tentative title: Click Here to Kill Everybody Peril and Promise in a Hyper-Connected World There are two underlying metaphors in the book. The first is what I have called the World-Sized Web, which is that combination of mobile, cloud…
Wrong signal
In recent months, privacy and civil rights activists have increasingly recommended the use of Signal [1] , an instant messenger app developed by Open Whisper Systems (OWS). After Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election in particular, many tweets recommended using hard disk encryption and the ostensibly…
Why Haters Hate: Kierkegaard Explains the Psychology of Trolling in 1847
“Showing that they don’t care about me, or caring that I should know they don’t care about me, still denotes dependence.”