Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,938 posts.
My child is 3 years old. I was looking for a game that we could play together and would be her first programming-like activity. I wasn’t keen to teach her anything specifically but rather offer her the option to explore what coding or algorithmic thinking tasted like (similarly when you would give your child a sheet…
One of the hardest questions I’ve had to answer as part of the project formerly known as epistemic spot checks is: “how do I know what to write down?” This will be kind of meandering, so here’s the…
the general consensus around being an npc is that you’re giving up your autonomy—essentially becoming a side character in someone else's story or watching li...
The median U.S. worker is 42. However, StackOverflow’s survey on age shows that there are just about 13% of developers after 40. Where are the others? Were they fired or moved up to a managerial role? Is software development really a dead end job after 40? Let’s listen to the stories of top software developers after…
This page has moved to https://drmaciver.com/notebook/2020/02/the-social-obligation-to-be-bad-at-things/ .
I recently rewatched "The Wire". The show's central theme is about counter-productive metrics and their corrupting influence on institutions. I've noticed hints of this pattern in software engineering, too
Whose woods these are I think I know
The popular book from the "world's most famous living psychiatrist" is riddled with blatant misrepresentations
The Librem 5 does not run Android or iOS, it runs a proper Linux operating system ( PureOS , derived from Debian). There are hardware kill switches for the baseband modem, the camera and microphone, and WiFi and bluetooth. The phone's main selling point is that it doesn't spy on you.
They made computers behave like annoying salesmen | exotext
Vitamin D deficiency is linked to cancer, heart disease, respiratory infection, stroke, diabetes, and death. It might seem reasonable that we should all be taking this supplement.
I’ve just finished setting up a new Mac (14" MBP, M2 Pro, 32G, 4T). It dawned on me that most of my really intense interactions with this thing involve looking at “monospace” (i.e. fixed-width) text; in Emacs where I write this blog, in my IDE, and in my terminal. The ones that came with the machine by default are…
(Recently I found the following text in manuscript among old papers of mine. It must have been written in the middle of 1973, but I don't think that in the intervening three years it has lost anything of its significance. Hence I now incorporate it in the EWD-series.)
Yes, you can make money writing books. But never do it for that.
Time is invisible so it's easy to spend without proper consideration to its value. Seneca offers a warning on how we squander our time only to regret it.
While writing the documentation for Org-roam, it occurred to me that I have things to say that do not belong in the documentation. I wrote Org-roam because Org-mode simply didn’t have the utilities to enable the kind of note-taking workflow I wanted. I don’t want to be prescriptive about how note-taking should be…
For the past few months I’ve been compiling a list of books for a deep dive into interesting technical topics. My theory is that working on projects based on these topics will be like strong individual threads I can weave into epic hacks. This list is basically a curriculum for decades of learning about the wonders of…
You know those things that, once you learn about them for the first time, you start seeing them absolutely everywhere? Recently, that’s been my experience with problem-solution ordering issues. They keep cropping up: not just in the context of gam...
Exactly on this day, one year ago, I came back from a one month long trip to Taiwan, went straight to work from the airport and immediately moved into a new apartment after work. Since then I have cycled to work nearly every day.
A long long rant about my continued frustration with today's Apple. Nothing new, really.
This morning, two emails came in from Apple. The first was about the upcoming renewal of my yearly subscription to Disney+ and the second email was about the price increase of my Disney+ subscription from $79.99 to $109.99. It took me all of 10 seconds to think about it, but I canceled my subscription. It’s not really…
This is a story about finding a job as a senior software engineer in Toronto - with a twist: just having moved there from Germany.
The phrase arrived in my head so completely formed and concrete that I couldn’t believe it wasn’t already established in the lexicon, but at least preliminary searches suggest it is not…
I’ve been seriously traveling for more than 50 years. So now I’ve got a few tips. There are two modes of travel; retreat or engage. People often travel to escape the routines of work, to recharge, relax, reinvigorate, and replenish … Continue reading →
