4351
"A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" Simulated by GPT-4
A short simulation of Neal Stephenson's Illustrated Primer using GPT-4 and DALL·E 3.
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,743 posts.
4352
Reversing the effects of long programming sessions
Programming for long periods is like walking a high tight rope for a really, really long period of time, or at least I imagine it is... ...
4353
4354
Forget Twitter threads and write a blog post instead (2021)
All of the kool kids in Twitter land seem to be jumping on the bandwagon of a very annoying craze. Twitter threads. Please stop; write a blog post instead
4355
Why is everybody knitting chickens?
A couple years ago, my wife began knitting. And when she takes an interest in something, she goes all in. She’s a perfectionist about learning a new craft, so in a short amount of time, she’s gotten pretty damn good. I can’t even pretend to know anything
4356
4357
Cross Views
Your camera has the ability to take three dimensional photos. Your screen has the ability to display three dimensional photos. You’ve probably never used either.
4358
The local timeline is the key to enjoying Mastodon
I'm sure you have already heard about Mastodon, typically marketed as a Twitter alternative. I will try to convince you that the word alternative doesn't mean here what you think it means, and why you may be using Mastodon wrong if you find it bori
4359
Literate programming is much more than just commenting code
Most programmers haven’t heard of literate programming , and the few that have tend to think it means writing a lot of comments around your code. However, simply explaining code with prose, does not constitute literate programming. Consider the following quote from it’s inventor:
4360
4361
How much oranger do red orange bags make oranges look?
Look at this orange: Now look at this orange: It’s the same orange. But, look how much more orange it looks with the red mesh on top of it: If you buy bags of oranges (at least at many places in the US), they frequently come in this red mesh bag. This bag makes the oranges look more orange. Oranger. Here’s what that…
4362
Hacking strength: Gaining muscle with least resistance
Then, after realizing I was too weak to lift my son and his wheelchair in and out of the car, I spent just over a year gaining strength and muscle.
4363
Don’t Fly During Ramadan (2013)
A couple of weeks ago, I tried to fly from New York (JFK) to Los Angeles on JetBlue. I was racially profiled, detained, and interrogated for hours.
4364
More Good Programming Quotes (2016)
In my previous post, The Wisdom of Programming Quotes, I called out some quotes that look good on the surface, but turn out to promote the wrong ideas about software development. I have also posted…
4365
Personal Finance Lessons for Technology Professionals
> Patience. Frugality. Sacrifice. When you boil it down, what do those three things have in common? Those are choices. Money is not peace of mind. Money’s not happiness. Money is, at its essence, that measure of a man’s choices. This is part of the opening monologue of the
4366
4367
John Varley has died
. John Varley died two days ago on December 10, 2025. A great many will mourn him as a science fiction writer whose work they enjoyed. But...
4368
Reality is a Shared Hallucination (1997)
The artificial construction of reality was to play a key role in the new form of global intelligence which would soon emerge among human beings. If the group brain's "psyche" were a beach with shifting dunes and hollows, individual perception would be that beach's grains of sand. However this image has a hidden snag …
4369
4370
Baking with machine learning (2020)
Like many people, I’ve been entertaining myself at home by baking a ton. I’ve gotten pretty good at following recipes, but I decided I wanted to take things one step further and understand the science behind what differentiates a cake from a bread or a cookie. I also like machine learning so I thought: what if I could…
4371
4372
Legally Free Python Books List
Searching for the best legally free Python books can be overwhelming with so many broken links and outdated resources. This curated list provides over 80 high-q...
4373
Public speaking for normal people
I just gave a presentation on 42Floors to 150 people. It went well. I was really proud of: 1) our team, 2) our product and 3) the way we were able to present it. It was as if we were telling people about it in our living room, but there just happened to be 150 people there. Afterwards, several people told me that it…
4374
The best things and stuff of 2020
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2020. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
4375
How I came to write “Tidy First?” tl;dr it took 18 years
Taking a software design course in college (Go Ducks!), we used Ed Yourdon (RIP) & Larry Constantine’s book Structured Design as a text.
4376
Putting Down the Pen: Reflecting on Oryx’s Journey
By Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans Dear everyone, I had always imagined 'penning' this farewell someday. You see, the journey of...
4377
The (logarithmic) calendar I want
I was looking at my Google Calendar tonight and I realized that this software was encouraging a way of thinking about time which has signifi...
4378
Julia
An aphasic space station monitors an anomalous object, while keeping the last two humans alive.
4379
4380
Adventures in Piano Building
Turning a mouse house into a musical marvel.