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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 715 posts.
I’ve been participating regularly in Advent of Code for the past couple of years. It’s one of the highlights of my holiday season. The puzzles are fun, the stories are appropriately ridiculous, and it’s a neat way for me to keep the cobwebs brushed off some of the things I learned years ago that I don’t regularly use…
Pages that didn't make it into "How DNS Works"
C++11 has been around for around 11 years and C++14 for 8. From my experience, I see that even today, many companies struggle to use those standards in production in the most efficient way. As always, with new stuff came benefits, risks, and increased learning effort. Fortunately, with a new book written by top C++…
Essay 52
Prose style and structure in The Tipping Point
Is your robotic vacuum cleaner getting stuck on the laundry drying rack? Just raise the rack slightly off the floor and it becomes a natural robot barrier.
One afternoon in Portland, I walked into World Cup & Tea to do some work. Instead, I had an encounter with the guy who invented the computer: Russell Kirsch
If you've clicked on the links, you've probably noticed a pattern: they are all Twitter threads. And Twitter threads are an absolute abomination.
Stargate SG-1 is the best and most balanced series to have ever aired on television. Ok, so some of you who have followed me for a very long time are thinking, “He’s making the same mis…
Reflections on a phenomena that’s unique to culture-war topics
We all have data that we need to store, and then find. Regardless of type, data tends to build up. Eventually, we need some system for organizing it into sensible categories. It turns out, this problem is harder than it seems. In this article, I'm going to be talking
Perhaps like you, I naively started out thinking that Google Slides was just a poorly maintained product suffering from some questionable…
In Work on what matters, I wrote about Hunter Walk’s idea of snacking: doing work that is easy to complete but low impact. The best story of my own snacking behaviors comes from my time at Stripe. I was focused on revamping the engineering organization’s approach to operating reliable software, and decided that it…
The CSSWG (CSS Working Group) is currently debating what to name a conditional structure, and it’s kind of fascinating.
I don’t really know who Dustin Curtis is, but he blogs a lot, and those blog entries often end up onHacker News. Not too long ago, he wrote a blog post titled “The Best,” in which he explains that he has nice stuff. That in fact, everything he owns is actually the very best of its kind.Dustin’s...
Utopian energy is an imagined form of energy that’s abundant, reliable, inexpensive, and also clean, renewable, and life-sustaining. But utopian energy is as much a fantasy as a utopian society. Seeking the fount of perfect energy allows us to pretend there aren’t real-world tradeoffs between, say,
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
People today are fighting the temptations of a new economy.
A few thoughts on why I think you should learn Racket.
I have frequently been critical of the advice given by baby boomers to “do what you love and the money will follow”. After the hard experience of my generation and the ones following it…
If you care about a creative practice, my guess is that you’ve already seen Peter Jackson’s new Beatles movie. If not, go check it out. It’s a miracle that the movie exists at all…
