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Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,743 posts.
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On Tolkien and Orwell
On first looking at J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) and George Orwell (1903-1950) they appear to have little in common, as men or writers, other than being peculiarly English authors with evergreen book sales. The year 1937 was a seminal one for both men and useful for highlighting their different lifestyles, politics and…
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Here’s to the Misfits
The school I went to in England used to proudly display their famous alumni in black and white photos circling the theatre lobby. From John le Carré, to John Cleese, the list included notable actors, top politicians and accomplished actors. What the school didn't tell admiring visitors though, is
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Friends of Vast Industrial Concrete Kafkaesque Structures
Photos of the Los Angeles River
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All of my side-projects from 2012
One of my favorite pastimes as a programmer is to work on personal projects outside of work. I use side-projects as a creative outlet to work on new and interesting things. I also use them as a learning exercise. If I start a side-project, there must be "one new thing" about the project I don't know how to do already…
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On Scaling Mental Models
No Newsletter Next Week I'll be on vacation in the Caribbean, sipping drinks and juggling for Hermit crabs. The Actual Thing I'm a vim user. I've used Vim...
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The Background Noise Was Louder than I Realized
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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The Slow Web
A popular old essay about finding calm and rhythm online.
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Social Psychology Is A Flamethrower
Mark Twain:There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. If this is true of all science, it is doubly true o…
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The View from RSS
What the web looks like when you subscribe to 2,000 RSS feeds.
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Personhood: A Game for Two or More Players
Being a person is not the essence of humanity, only... one of its many masks. — John Gray
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How I was failing to find time for life while working remotely
Since the last March, like a lot of other people, I was forced to work remotely. It was not the first time, but somehow it went different. I quickly found out that not having a context switch between the office and home forced me into non-healthy behaviors like giving work all the available time.
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Olaf's New Menu Item
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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A portentous reunion
I just attended my thirtieth college reunion, and there were some clear trends among my mid-life peers. First among them: grave concern for what AI means for our future and for the future of our (broadly young adult) kids.
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Behind the scenes: the struggle for each paper (2021)
The start of my sabbatical has given me a moment to reflect on my publications. But my CV only shows a list of neatly cataloged papers: title, authors, conference. Each one appearing no different from another. But how each paper ended up published is its own story, a story about people and opportunity.
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My 7 Year Old Son Found His People at the Maker Faire
Last Saturday my seven year old son found his people at the Maker Faire. It started on the train ride from the Menlo Park station. Normally the 9:34am train heading North on a Saturday is about as …
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Coming home from the South Pole
Emerging from winter and preparing for our first flight!
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Why We Think
Special thanks to John Schulman for a lot of super valuable feedback and direct edits on this post. Test time compute (Graves et al. 2016, Ling, et al. 2017, Cobbe et al. 2021) and Chain-of-thought (CoT) (Wei et al. 2022, Nye et al. 2021), have led to significant improvements in model performance, while raising many…
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I Am Parting with My Crypto Library
The time has come for me to find a new home for my (paper) cryptography library. It’s about 150 linear feet of books, conference proceedings, journals, and monographs—mostly from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. My preference is that it goes to an educational institution, but will consider a corporate or personal home if…
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Ibn Battuta: A Scholar's Epic Journey (2018)
This morning I stumbled upon [a video](https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/films/title/ibn-battutas-search-for-knowledge) that mentions one of the famous traveler, Ibn Battuta. And the deeper I dig, the more fascinated I am by his journey. It is one thing to visit a place and buy merchandises before return to home…
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Fruits (2020)
Fruits - Graph All The Things, a math blog by Martin Loncaric
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Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc in 2017
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2017. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
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Peanut Butter Jellyfin Time
“But what is best is what we saved for last. The one sure-fire thing to make your best day ever the best day ever!" — SpongeBob, ‘Jellyfishing’
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Tips for Interviewing over Zoom
Don’t let these videoconferencing mistakes be a stumbling block for a potential employer.
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Medical aid in dying, my health, and so on
I’ll start at the end, because that’s the most important part. Later this month, I’m obtaining medical aid in dying AKA death with dignity. Barring unforeseen circumstances or unexpected changes, my last day on earth will be June 13th, 2025. Realize that I’m just over 46 years old. So how the hell did we get here?…
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I will never need to buy a new computer again
If you're in your early thirties or older, you remember the breakneck pace at which computers were improving in the 90s and 2000s. If you brought home a shiny new 400MHz Pentium 2 system in 1998, it was literally outdated and replaced by a faster model with higher clock speed and more RAM/bigger harddrive by the time…
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If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?
I got an email recently from a long-time programmer who had to step out of the ...