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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,743 posts.
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Cognitive load theory and its applications for learning
What makes learning hard? How can we make it easier? Cognitive load theory explains how we learn and how to do it better.
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Sir Ian McKellen's Lord of the Rings Production Blogs
Journal entry from 20 August 1999, introducing his new blog about The Lord of the Rings.
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Superlogical
I authored 1 the announcement post on the Superlogical homepage , which describes the problem statement and what we're building. 2 Read that to learn more. This post is more of a personal statement about what led to this, how it relates to my recent work, and what comes next.
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Why are so many pedestrians killed by cars in the US?
It’s unfortunately not uncommon for pedestrians to be killed by cars in the US.
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The “je ne sais quoi” of TikTok
How a misunderstood platform has completely taken over the world.
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High-intensity exercise, some new news
Several months I noticed something interesting (to me!) about my heart rate, and I thought about blogging about it…but I didn’t feel like it would be interesting (to you!) so I’ve been hesitant. But then the NYT published something that is kinda related and I thought OK, what the hell, maybe it’s time for an update…
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I didn’t learn Unix by reading all the manpages (2022)
Originally drafted as a thread on hackers.town , after Abbie Normal asked me to expand on a side comment in a discussion of documentation .
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Regrets of the Dying (2010)
For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives.
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The destruction of graduate education in the United States
If and when you emerged from your happiness bubble to read the news, you’ll have seen (at least if you live in the US) that the cruel and reckless tax bill has passed the House of Representat…
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Programming isn’t coding (2020)
When teaching “programming”, a surprisingly small amount of time is spent actually helping students with logic – and a lot helping them learning & managing programming tools.
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Letter to John Carmack
The following is an email I sent to John Carmack of Id Software after I had watched his Quakecon 2012 Keynote Speech
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Long Names are Long
One smart thing Google does is rigorous code reviews. Every change, before you can land it, gets reviewed in at least two ways. First, someone on the team does a normal review to make sure the code does what it’s supposed to.
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I wish people were more public
On sharing more of yourself.
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Ignore Sunk Costs (2009)
The most important decision-making rule you learn in business school is still largely misunderstood. When making a choice between two options, only consider what’s going to happen in the futu…
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Ever young?
I turn 52 next week, and I have a confession to make: I feel like a complete failure at "adulting". Adulting, loosely defined, is that set of activities and behaviours which we judge to be characteristics of grown-ups. You can stop now and make your own list: what I'm going to suggest, speculatively, is that you…
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Paper is dead, long live paper programming
It should come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog that I love to program "by hand." I happen to practice a degree of ascetical programming practices, and I believe that they help me to more deeply internalize and understand problems, ultimately delivering higher quality solutions. One of
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The difference between "today's task" and "accretive work"
One thing I've learned about paradoxes: often the answer to the riddle of "how can this one thing have such a contradictory set of features and effects?" is "it's not one thing, it's two things*."
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Meeting strangers in the street
It figures that I would rediscover my desire to exercise at exactly the point in my life when it suddenly became unwise for me to exercise at all. On a Fr...
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Book review: Is parallel programming hard, and, if so, what can you do about it?
Here are my thoughts on the free online textbook Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It? by Paul E. McKenney, author of the Linux kernel’s RCU synchronization mechanism. I read a lot of this textbook, got my fill, and probably won’t read more of it in the near future so wanted to write this…
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How to Ace Calculus: The Art of Doing Well in Technical Courses
Tangent Troubles Calculus is easy. Or at least, it can be. The key is how you digest the material. Here’s an example: when you’re first ... Read more
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Video CDs Break Windows Explorer
There is an odd bug in Windows related to Video CDs . To reproduce it: Insert a Video CD (if you don't have one, you can download this fi...
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