Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,943 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
Seeing the Smoke
Information on the coronavirus is widely available, and it doesn’t look positive. So why is everyone waiting for permission to do something about it?
Notes on 416 Days of Treadmill Desk Usage
The personal website of author Neal Stephenson, unless it's been hacked.
I Taught My 8yo Subduction Zones with NotebookLM
Principal AI Architect. Creator of open-strix, a harness for building agent teams. Writing about AI architecture, stateful agents, and what happens when you give AI memory.
Unraveling the mysteries of habit formation
Researchers研究者名Asaoka, Nozomi
Leonardo Syndrome
Ever heard of Leonardo Syndrome? If you’ve read Peter Burke’s excellent book, The Polymath,[^1] then you will have done, but if not: Leonardo Syndrome is...
The map is not the territory (2015)
The map is not the territory reminds us that our mental models of the world are not the same as the world itself. It cautions against confusing our abstractions and representations with the complex, ever-shifting reality they aim to describe.
Fear and Loathing at Zigfu: My Y Combinator Experience
Applications for YCombinator's winter 2013 cycle are due October 30. Let me tell you about my experience in YCombinator with Zigfu . Zigf...
Hiding messages in a deck playing cards
I was recently thinking about the huge number of ways you can shuffle a deck of 52 cards and wondered if it would be possible to store arbitrary data.
What I do when I feel like giving up (2015)
I am struggling today, and maybe you are too. Don't give up yet, though. Read this article to learn what I remind myself of when I want to give up...
A tale of 132 e's
A few weeks ago my most popular repository on GitHub was crowbar , a Rust crate that I’m particularly proud of. It wasn’t necessarily good , but it did something interesting. It has 168 stars.
The Procrastinating Caveman: Human Evolution and Procrastination
Survivor: Paleolithic Edition Rewind time 100,000 years ago: several different species of humans co-exist on earth.There was, of course, our own species, Homo sapien, but ... Read more
Reliability, constant work, and a good cup of coffee
Why constant-work patterns make systems more reliable, doing the same predictable work regardless of load to avoid surprising failure modes.
The freakishly strong base
The earth used to be covered in ice.
A Simple and Dynamic Method for Consistent Productivity
Throughout my career, though I’ve managed to be productive in aggregate, I’ve always sought to be more consistent in my productivity. How productive I am at a given moment seems driven …
My app just won best iOS Japanese learning tool of 2025 award (blog)
Welcome to the award show everyone! Hosted by your favourite bee... Bee! 🥳 I wanted to summarise the best tools etc out there in 2025, and what better way then to put on a fake award show! And like all true award shows and Christmas themed events, let's get into
The Founder's Lie About Comfort Zones
There is a lot of talk going on about the endurance and struggle that startup founders go through. How long the hours are, we all...
How to mess with your roommate (2018)
Before I explain what I did to hurt poor Logan, I must explain our apartment’s media setup. You will see why shortly.
Not everyone is going to like the thing you made, and that’s okay
I recently worked on an upcoming video game from Double Fine, called Broken Age. I got to play a really fun character, and I had a super good time working with one of my favorite directors in the i…
Airship Tails
Our team at Google got the opportunity to fly in a Zeppelin yesterday. This is the first Zeppelin to fly in the US since the Hindenburg. I had been looking forward to this flight for several years. The photos are spectacular.
Psychology of Human Misjudgment
A summary of the legendary investor, Charlie Mungers talk on Psychology.
I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows
I've been distro-hopping for probably twenty years. Every time I install Linux I feel a small swell of optimism, like this time it'll stick. Linux never sticks with me.
I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one
I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one.
Giving up on smart rings
The downsides to wearing a fitness-tracking device on your finger
On Browser Tabs
It's always surprised me how little I hear about browsers.