7291
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
7292
7293
Woo for Its Own Sake
Software development is a funny profession. It covers people who do stuff ranging from register twiddling in device drivers and OS guts, to people who serve web content, to “big data” s…
7294
Don't become an expert
Tired of being told you need "10,000 hours" before you can call yourself an "expert," and maybe become a "success?" Maybe you don't.
7295
The obsession with next
The tech world is obsessed with what’s next. It has become so used to the constant flow of new products and new companies that newness itself has been placed on a pedestal. But outside of a few breakthroughs here and there, most things that are good are good because they got there slowly. …
7296
How to Get Rich (1999)
[JARED DIAMOND:] In Guns, Germs, and Steel I asked why history has unfolded differently over the last 13,000 years in Eurasia, in the Americas, in sub-Saharan Africa, and in Aboriginal Australia, with the result that within the last 500 years Europeans were the ones who conquered Native Americans and Aboriginal…
7297
The Books of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
I discovered that they’d published a complete, illustrated version of the Earthsea cycle a couple weeks ago. I’m not overly fond of omnibus editions, but this is illustrated by Charles …
7298
7299
How fast do I talk?
I speak very fast. It’s like the words are piled up in my mouth and I can’t say one without the rest tumbling out. Through my whole life people have told me to slow down, speak more clearly, and enunciate. I can do it if I concentrate but I quickly relapse into gushing out words. As I now give lots of conference…
7300
On The Need For Understanding
blog dot information dash superhighway dot net2026118 points45 commentsLife, Learning & Writing details
I saw this Mastodon post from Andy Wingo recently: in these days of coding agents and what-not, i often think of gerald sussman's comm...
7301
7302
On Technical Writing
How I make it work (or not)
7303
The Moon Illusion, an Unsolved Mystery
physics, history of science, pseudoscience, hoaxes, writing, education, skepticisism, humor, quotes, illusions, 3d stereo photography.
7304
7305
7306
7307
7308
7309
7310
Finance for Geeks
Summary: Eric Sink provides a geek-oriented overview of accounting and company funding.
7311
Thanks, HN Here are the vocab survey results from all your participation
Test your English vocabulary size and measure how many words you know with Preply's free test (ex. Testyourvocab.com). For children, adults and EFL/ESL learners.
7312
John Carpenter’s “Planaria”: Or, the New Individualism
It happened for me back in the eighties, when I encountered the definition of “Life” in Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker : “Information, shaped by natural selection”. That concise distillation—an actual description of what life is , as opposed to all those tired and exception-prone checklists that only talk about what…
7313
7314
Elizabeth Cotton’s Fingerstyle Ragtime
Dust-to-digital posted this lovely performance of “Washington Blues” by Elizabeth Cotten. It reminded me that she is the greatest and that I should write more about her. If you are a gu…
7315
Ben “bushing” Byer has passed away
We are deeply saddened by the news that our member, colleague, and friend Ben “bushing” Byer has passed away.
7316
Confidence Through Feedback, or Why Imposter Syndrome Is the Wrong Metaphor
Imposter syndrome is often presented as a personal failing. A lack of confidence, our wrong-headed beliefs not matching the reality of how competent we are, or worst of a flaw of our gender. Just...
7317
Ju Ci: The Art of Repairing Porcelain
Ju ci (锔瓷), the Chinese craft of repairing broken porcelain has roots dating back to the Song dynasty (960-1279), with illustrations of craftsmen mending pots appearing in Chinese paintings as earl…
7318
How I ended up with so much Hacker News karma
On the Hacker News leaderboard I'm currently in position #12 with 32,360 points. I was curious to find out how I ended up in that position...
7319
How bad is QWERTY, really? A review of the literature, such as it is
Texts on this and that.
7320
A few months ago, a complete stranger gave me $10k (2021)
When I worked in magazines, almost twenty years ago, something we always held true was that sales went up twenty per cent when the words…