Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 640 posts.
Listen in on Jane Street’s Ron Minsky as he has conversations with engineers working on everything from clock synchronization to reliable multicast, build systems to reconfigurable hardware. Get a peek at how Jane Street approaches problems, and how those ideas relate to tech more broadly.
People hate change. They have something of a tendency to dig their heels in and be against it just because it is new and different. They as...
...and to the psychologist who put it on the map.
This is my first attempt to “think out loud” about the question I get most often: why bother reading the Classics? This is still very much a work in progress: I think people don’t consider and adapt their own beliefs often enough (see also: mental liquidity ). I consider my opinions here to be very much loosely held…
This week we nerd out on watermelons (available May to October). All living beings on Earth constantly search for water—tree roots grow into cracked or leaky underground pipes to access the water they carry, camels can go a full week without drinking thanks to the unique water-storage capacity of their oval-shaped red…
Using your phone as a dumb terminal with a Bluetooth keyboard
I was standing on a floating dock on a Pacific-ocean inlet, a place where it’s obvious why motorboats are such an environmental disaster. Fortunately lots of other people have noticed too and it looks increasingly that more people will be able to enjoy Messing About In Boats without feeling like they’re making Greta…
P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.
If you’re knowledgeable in a technical field, writing a book to teach others a few things can be a rewarding experience on many different levels. With the many avenues available for self-publishing these days, an important question to ask yourself is “Do I need a publisher?”. The answer depends on your particular…
Greenland shark swimming under an ice flow in the Canadian arctic WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY-SA 4.0)
I’ve had it up to here (gestures at nose level) with the bullshit around programming language elitism. Back when I thought it mattered I was just as bad as the bullshit I’m seeing today…
Using spaced repetition to create understanding
2011 was an important year in the history of psychology, especially social psychology. First, it became apparent that one social psychologist had faked results for dozens of publications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel). Second, a highly respected journal published an article with the incredible claim…
Last year I discovered, much to my chagrin, that always-on internet socializing was costly for me. This was inconvenient both because I’d spent rather a lot of time singing the praises of social me…
Over the last few months, I dove really deep into the topic of addiction and compulsive use of the Internet.
In April, I wrote operatornotify.py , a module which allows my programs to notify me of important information or errors. I was immediately very proud of it. It felt awesome to get so much impact out of a sub-100 line module as I went around hooking it up to my existing programs and getting the tracebacks from my…
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Make sure you're playing the real game, not some more complicated game you've made up for yourself.
The Long-termist's Field Guide: 1,000 Ideas For The Next 1,000 Years
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
I recently read Turing’s Cathedral, a book about the early history of computers, and it largely focused on the life and brilliant times of John von Neumann, who was, to put it simply, a genius. It is both fascinating and disappointing to learn about a brain that works so much better than your own. Fascinating because…
I’ve been reading John Ousterhout’s A Philosophy of Software Design . At one point in the book, he gives this advice about code comments: Unfortunately, many…
Some thoughts on the New York Times' Slate Star Codex profile
Reading time: 15 minutes There are many significant differences between Latin and its linguistic descendants, the Romance languages. One that stands out from the rest is grammatical gender. Latin h…
Welcome to Yak Shaving School! As part of my MSc I'm reading a book about Data Analytics. So I've been chasing down quotes to find their origin. One paper had this popular quote in it (emphasis added): As with many rapidly emerging concepts, Big Data has been variously defined and operationalized, ranging from trite…
