7171
Why read old philosophy?
I’m going to try to explain a mystery that puzzled me for years. This answer finally dawned on me in the middle of one of those occasional conversations in which non-perplexed friends patiently try…
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,944 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
7172
Where to Sleep in LAX
My 11:30 pm connecting flight out of Los Angeles International Airport was delayed by 24 hours, forcing me to rest in the airport. All my bags were checked, so I had no luggage or spare clothes available. Here's where I tried sleeping and how it went.
7173
Programming book authors: put all the code in the book
tl;dr: programming book authors: put all the code in the book! An extreme antipattern for a programming book is “download the author’s idiosyncratic library code from some random URL an…
7174
Pieces of Shit
I listened to this song last night.
7175
My Contribution to Markdown
At long last revealed.
7176
The Leave
Whatever we *expected*, we all *hoped* we’d seen our last Steve Jobs medical leave.
7177
Forget coding, we need to teach our kids how to dream
Tom Goodwin on the five key attributes we should help kids develop instead of focusing on knowledge.
7178
Stab a Book, the Book Won't Die
On the resilience of books in the face of apps, attention monsters, and an ad-driven online economy
7179
Unquantified
The only real valuable thing is intuition. – Albert Einstein A year ago I got rid of my scale, a simple act that turned out to be the catalyst for a year’s worth of quiet introspection and experimentation in removing quantification from my life. A year later I’m quantifiably more ignorant about myself than I have been…
7180
Lean into the pain
When you first begin to exercise, it’s somewhat painful. Not wildly painful, like touching a hot stove, but enough that if your only goal was to avoid pain, you certainly would stop doing it. But if you keep exercising… well, it just keeps getting more painful. When you’re done, if you’ve really pushed yourself, you…
7181
Running a business means contact with reality
A year ago I decided to help build a service business for my mom because I wanted to learn about marketing and business. One of the largest blindspots engineers have is around sales and marketing. I was determined to not fall into this trap, but marketing seemed like a skill I couldn’t just learn by […]
7182
On Anonymity
Yesterday I encountered a blog whose comment section wasn’t linked up with Facebook or Disqus. It was just a pure email/display name system from years past – one where no one had any interest in tracking your activity across the entire interwebs. Putting in a display name that maybe wasn’t your full name – first and…
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Humans Need Play
On a vicious pattern that breeds burnout.
7185
Blood Pumping Mechanism of the Hoof (2020)
Blood is pumped from the heart through arteries to the hoof and is assisted in its return through a “pumping mechanism” in the hoof. This mechanism is necessary due to the position of the hoof in relation to the heart. There are no muscles in the lower leg or hoof to aid in the return of venous blood to the heart…
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Entrepreneurship is hard but you can’t die
I’m posting a series of articles on family, startup culture and careers. These vignettes are about how I’ve lived my life trying to make a dent in the universe. Hoping they’ll give you a point of v…
7189
The Importance of Limitations for Creativity and Learning (2023)
The other day, my kids started messing around (at home) with an online document writing platform their school uses. They’d discovered a fun little easter egg. I watched them laugh and play with the feature - pushing its limits and ultimately crashing the browser.
7190
Patterns for Personal Web Sites (2003)
Guidelines for creating a living personal Web site.
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Why I learned to "make things"
Two years ago this week, I started working at 37signals. I couldn’t make a web app to find my way out of a paper bag. When I started working here, my technical skills were in tools like Excel, R, and Matlab, and I could muddle my way through SQL queries. I had the basic technical skills tha…
7193
University of Waterloo Systems Design Engineering 2017 Class Profile
Sometimes a yearbook doesn’t quite cut it. In our final semester of university, the Systems Design Engineering class of 2017 was curious…
7194
The Top Shelf Principle (2019)
The Top Shelf Principle | Mo — Previously built Standard Note...
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Two i's
For a long time I’ve felt like the only thing worth working on is the next most important thing. Why spend time working on something that’s less important if there’s something more important that needs work? I’ve changed my mind on this. I think it’s always good to…
7197
Asterisk
Challenged to write about a single Unicode character, I chose the humble asterisk. In this post, Julia takes a back seat but it’s working hard behind the scenes. [1] The font used for the examples is JuliaMono.
7198
Making progress on side projects with content-driven development
It's hard to make progress on side projects sometimes. Getting started is easy when we see the bright future of the project. Then somewhere in the middle, we get stuck in lists of tasks to do, a long way in and still a long way from the finish line.
7199
I've Written a Book
Executive summary: I've written a book. If you like this site, you'll love the book. You can buy it printed on paper or as a DRM-free ebook on the Pragmatic Programmers website .
7200
Jobs Inside the API
If someone is worse at their job than a drunk person with Google, why do they still have their job?