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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,940 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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Your heart rate at gunpoint
It’s a beautiful evening, albeit a little cold. I’m heading home after a long day. I’m walking down a familiar street. I feel safe, I feel…
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Place mushrooms in sunlight to get your vitamin D (2012)
(Originally published online in Huffington Post's Healthy Living section.) Vitamin D is an essential vitamin that boosts the immune system and plays vital roles in human metabolism. Did you know that tasty mushrooms are one source for vitamin D, and that you can naturally multiply their levels by exposing them to sunli
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Ego Death
Social media aggravates the ego. Virtuous content drifts to the extremes and becomes counter productive at scale. Focusing on external validation is futile and robs the soul of a deeper meaning.
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Steve Pavlina: 30 days since I quit Facebook
It’s been about 30 days since I quit Facebook , so I wanted to share an update on what that’s been like. Many others also quit the service last month, and many more are on the fence as to whether they should do the same.
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Thoughts on, and pictures of, the original Macintosh User Manual
I recently purchased an original Macintosh User Manual (thanks eBay !). I had seen one at a garage sale, and was struck by how it had to explain a total paradigm shift in interacting with computers. I figured I could learn something about helping make innovation happen.
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Why it's great to write blog posts
I’ve been blogging for close to four years now. I started blogging because I wanted to pick up a new skill (writing) and challenge myself to do something new. Because I blog about what is both my work and hobby - software development and more specifically, cloud/platform engineering - it’s relatively simple to come up…
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What data on myself I collect and why (2020)
How I am using 50+ sources of my personal data
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Pee If You Want to Go Deeper (2021)
While I’m usually blogging about triathlon, today I want to discuss one of my other hobbies, scuba diving. Diving in the UK usually requires diving in a dry suit (not always, but trust me, it’s a LOT more comfortable). One of the biggest concerns that many have is about how to deal with the bladder
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How we gave colors names and it messed with our brains (part II)
Update: This post was an Editor’s pick by Cristy Gelling at Science Seeker, and was included in Bora Zivkovic’s top 10 science blog posts of the week. Lately, I’ve got colors on t…
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You Don't Need to Be Brilliant to Do Brilliant Work
My friend Csongor recently published a computer science paper that’s super interesting if you’re as big a nerd as I am. The details are too much to go into here, but suffice to say, it lets us do a lot of things I’d always been told were impossible.
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The Feynman Technique: The Best Way to Learn Anything (2012)
Master the Feynman Technique: Nobel laureate's 4-step learning method to understand anything deeply through teaching, simplification, and systematic review.
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Simple Truths Smart People Forget
Some of the smartest people I know continuously struggle to get ahead because they forget to address a few simple truths that collectively govern our potential to make progress. So here’s a …
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Hellbanned from Hacker News
Yesterday I submitted a post on Hacker News out of frustration at moderators pedantically changing post titles. After quickly rising to the number two spot on the front page with 482 points and 37 comments, the post was deleted by a moderator, presumably the operator of the site, Paul Graham.
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Worldbuilding
There is a grand tradition of scientifically minded science fiction authors creating not just the characters in their novels but also the brass tacks scientific details of the planets they reside on. This is the art and science of Worldbuilding .
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“Working Too Hard And Not Getting Anywhere”
Continuing the case method on MBA Mondays, I am going to tell a story about a business model pivot that was not a full business pivot. In the lull between Flatiron and Union Square Ventures, I made a few angel investments and the best one was in a company called TACODA that went on to […]
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PinePhone review after a month of daily driving
All opinions are my own, and most of the review is for my own use-cases. There are some comparisons, mostly for entertainment purposes, to iOS (based on my previous device, iPhone 12 Pro) and Android (based on my current device, de-googled OnePlus Nord N10 5G).
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To grieve, or not to grieve?
Recent events in the field of AI for mathematics have shown us beyond all reasonable doubt that the field is currently undergoing a rapid transformation, unlike anything that we have ever seen befo…
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Advice for ambitious 19 year olds
“I’m an ambitious 19 year old, what should I do?” I get asked this question fairly often, and I now have a lot of data on what works, so I thought I’d share my response. Usually, people are...
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Brown M&Ms, or Why No One Reads the Manual
One of our favorite anecdotes that illustrates just how hard it is to get people to read the docs comes from an unexpected source: Van Halen. The...
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Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking
I’ve been surprised by - and enjoy - one aspect of using large language models more than any other. They often put into words things I have long understood, but could not write down clearly. When that happens, it feels less like learning something new and more like recognition. A kind of “ok, yeah" moment.…
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Job loss and cortisone mania
On the morning of 18th August, I got invited at short notice into a 1:1 meeting by my manager, which was unusual . I think I knew what was coming, and I was right: The company is restructuring, and I’m being let go (among a lot of other people). I had time until lunch to say my goodbyes to my colleagues as I would be…