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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,937 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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“Subject: Urgent Warning”
Back in December I got a desperate email from this person. A woman who said her Instagram had been hacked and since she found my contact info in the app she mailed me and asked for help. I of course replied and said that I have nothing to do with her being hacked but I … Continue reading “Subject: Urgent Warning” →
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One Year After Quitting My Job
Last year I did a year in review post, so by doing it again this year I am turning it into a tradition. This is more for me (to see my own progress) than it is for you, but I hope you can learn something as well. If you want to read last years you […]
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A server that wasn't meant to exist
A story from 16 years ago - trust, tech, and a server that had to disappear. They offered me a blank check. I said no.
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Learn electricity and electronics fundamentals without taking a formal course
A website supporting the books of author Simon Monk.
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Write to Escape Your Default Setting
Writing serves as a foundation for clarity in thought. It can help you engage more deeply with your ideas.
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Everything must be paid for twice
One financial lesson they should teach in school is that most of the things we buy have to be paid for twice. There’...
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You can just say it
There is a weird collection of arguments for appraising the value of humans and their creative artifacts. It usually goes something like this: In the age of AI, we should still prefer humans in certain roles because AI could never perform the tasks required for that role. Or, a human can at least do it better. Or…
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From novice to master, and back again (2013)
In 1985, I was a freshman at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. The college had a VAX 11/780 running 4.2BSD and a PDP-11/70 running v7 with some Berkeley and local code hacked in. It was my first exper…
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We live in an age of distractions, dealing with constant mental stimulus
Yet another calm weekend after months of lockdowns and I sit down to enjoy a book. After turning a couple of pages, I'm no longer able to keep going. In-between, I've managed to look at my phone four times and I've had my thoughts wander away. Why does something so simple feel suddenly so difficult?
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Troubleshooting: A skill that never goes obsolete
Much of what I do, in multiple fields, could be reduced to one skill: troubleshooting. I’ll define troubleshooting as systematically determining the cause of unwanted behaviour in a system, and fixing it. Troubleshooting is often learned tacitly, in the process of explicitly learning “the skill”. Troubleshooting is…
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What Is The Morning Writing Effect?
Many writers anecdotally report they write best first thing early in the morning, apparently even if they are not morning people. Do they, and why?
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I wrote a small piece on planned death
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
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Tallest Lego building with 4 pieces?
My daughter asked me: “Daddy, what’s the tallest structure we can build with those 4 pieces?”
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Music Theory for Programmers
I can't play an instrument, so I worked out music theory in JavaScript instead. Twelve notes, scales and chords, derived from scratch with code you can hear.
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How to Exist
Here’s an experiment for a true daredevil. Sit there for a three minutes, following two rules:
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Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket
I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that you, like me, have a large pile (or digital equivalent) of books or articles you've been meaning to get around to reading, plus maybe a long queue of podcast episodes to which you'd love to listen, if only you had the time. It's the archetypal "first-world problem", I…
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Lessons in creating family photos that people want to keep (2018)
As a consequence of scanning thousands of slides, I learned quite a bit about taking photos that capture a family’s life. Here’s a personal…
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Think Bayes: Bayesian Statistics Made Simple (2012)
This HTML version of Think Bayes is provided for convenience, but it is not the best format for the book. In particular, some of the math symbols are not rendered correctly.
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Compound pejoratives on Reddit
What can Reddit comment data tell us about the rules governing the formation of insulting compound words like 'fartface', 'scumwad', or 'assgoblin'?
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Distributor cancelled an order and we need to move 30k bags of coffee [updated]
UPDATE, 10:56PM CT: THE POWER OF THE INTERNET SAVED THE DAY. All of the bags of caffeinated coffees sold out. That’s approximately 24,000 bags of coffee. You all are amazing! We are overwhelmed with gratitude and will update tomorrow. Hopefully we can find these lonely bags of decaf a good home, too. We’ve had a…