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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,743 posts.
The cleverness of an idea is proportionate to its odds of failure. Brian Kernighan once said that “debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” I have built many things that I wasn’t…
I got a very earnest and well-phrased email from a young person overseas ...
The entire archive of six years of my show On Contact has been disappeared from YouTube.
First published Jan. 17, 2019; updated Nov. 15, 2019 Let me briefly tell my Linux story. If you're thinking about moving to Linux, and wondering how you'd do so, it might give you some pointers and inspiration. The back story My first introduction to the command line was in the 80s when I f
This article is supported by my Patreon. If you like what you see, please consider contributing. I feel like hard counters get a bad rap in RTS games. There are a lot of arguments out there both fo…
The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” I wonder if he would have said so if his native language wasn’t German. Whether one agrees with it or not (I personally would do so partially!), there’s some modern neuroscience that backs important portions…
Criticism can prevent mistakes. It can never create value. Only ideas can do that. The two are not equal contributions, and most meetings get this backwards.
[This is a guest post by Silvia De Toffoli and Eamon Duede. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Silvia De Toffoli (University School …
We’d all like life to be simpler. But we also don’t want to sacrifice our options and capabilities. Tesler’s law of the conservation of complexity, a rule from design, explains why we can’t have both. Here’s how the law can help us create better products and services by rethinking simplicity.
Content warning: risk to children Julia and I know drowning is the biggest risk to US kids 1-4, and we try to take this seriously. But yesterday our 4yo came very close to drowning in a fountain. (She's fine now.) This week we were on vacation with my extended family: nine kids, eight parents, and ten…
I thought for sure that I’d previously written about the secret jelly packet & pickle-based system that chefs at the Waffle House use to “store” all of the orde
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Last week, the NTSB held the Asiana Flight 214 Investigative Hearing. On the 6th of July 2013, Asiana Flight 214, a scheduled passenger flight from Incheon, South Korea to San Francisco, CA, crashe…
If you want to make a lot of money perhaps you should first ask yourself this critical question which could dramatically alter the way you think about your
i dont really get it... did you actually create multiple account? did you redeem multiple adwords credit coupons? what exactly did you do? or were there just other people with the same idea so there were multiple adwords accounts advertising dropbox? if the latter: would it be possible to get other advertisers banned…
September 2011 Unless the people benefit, economic growth is a subsidy for the rich. —Richard Falk, “Post-Mubarak Revolutionary Chances,” Al Jazeera , 22 Feb. 2011 It’s as silly for me to write about economics as it would be for most economists to write about the use of enjambment in iambic p
I have been writing articles on this website for twelve years. If you were to look at the early versions , you would think it is a fresh-out-of-school project with icons drawn in Microsoft Paint. And that is exactly what it was. The site started in a world before smartphones and tablets at a time where Apple products…
Posted on Friday 27 Aug 2021. 776 words, 2 links. By Matt Webb.
Optimism requires believing in an unknown, unproven future
How I massively over-engineered a trivial problem again because I just can't help myself
When you're just getting started with music, you have so many skills to learn. You have to be able to play your instrument and express yourself through it. You need to know the style you're playing, and its idioms and conventions. You may want to record your music, and need all the skills that come along with it.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Why I think comfort leads to stagnation and overcoming friction leads to growth.
I can't sleep. I'm lying in bed every night, and images of Gaza are running through my head. Fathers holding their babies, dead, caked in dust. Bombs dropped on homes [1], on hospitals [2], on schools [3]. Tens of thousands of dead [4] in indiscriminate bombings [5]. Children
