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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 715 posts.
I was having an off-day a few months ago. To try and lift my spirits, I decided to take advantage of the fact that I have the ability to time travel. Not literally, of course, but figuratively in the one direction of the past (which is almost as good
The word "kayak" is a palindrome, but it isn't visually symmetric. The word "bud" is visually symmetric, but not a palindrome.
Chances are, you've met far more stupid cousins than you realize
"They would have eaten our whole house and probably the whole cul-de-sac if we didn't find those jelly beans."
I spent most of April and some of May traveling around Ukraine, visiting the cities of Uzhgorod, Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Odessa. As with my other travels, I’ll write down thoughts and obse…
These statements can be hard to argue against, especially if they come from someone who is more experienced than you. A lot of the trouble is that they are not wrong – well, they’re not completely wrong.
Recreation DOT gov gets managed by the multi-billion dollar DC beltway firm of Booz-Allen-Hamilton. And here’s why I think it’s awful.
For the first time, I won a major raffle at a recent conference. However, I had to give the prize back since it was a beer dispenser and I don’t drink. If your reaction after reading the last line was “Why don’t you drink?” or “Most of us do and it’s your choice that you missed out.”, then this blog is for you. I’m…
How to vote back home while you're in Antarctica!
Has someone asked you to do something recently that you know you don’t have time to do but felt like you needed to do anyway? Or has someone tried to get you to help with something and impres…
An interview with Keith Blount, the founder, director and lead developer of Literature & Latte.
If we just see our task as documenting solutions that engineers have solved, it removes the creativity and critical thinking dimension from tech comm. The creative dimension in tech comm comes into play as we identify and solve tech comm challenges, such as devising ways to simplify complexity or otherwise improve the…
It's pretty much what you'd expect.
The “Dynamic Medium Group” led by Bret Victor which is developing “Dynamicland” is much admired and closely watched in the interaction design community. Yet the information about their work is closely-guarded and usually only available in a highly moderated form. The work of ethnographer Götz Bachmann, who spent much…
Where do you stand in order to minimize the expected distance to walk to catch the first elevator that arrives? Maybe not where you think.
Consumption, brutality, and the cute
You can't force luck. But you can increase your chances (by a lot) to get lucky. Here's how to do it with luck surface area.
We should encourage more public disagreement.
One of the most interesting pieces I’ve come across lately was Hugh Eakin’s piece on the backstory of one of Picasso’s most prominent works, Guernica. During the creative process for Guernica, Picasso created 45 different sketches before settling on the final direction of the painting: Guernica debuted in 1937 at the…
The common way to talk about happiness is as a single scale: unhappy at one end, neutral in the middle, happy at the other end. I think that model is wrong.
Finalist #15 in the Book Review Contest
The strange interactions of Selfhood and Multiplicity
People ask me about processes all the time. Planning processes, performance review processes, OKRs, et cetera. I think it’s because I was once a COO and people have this vision of COOs as process fiends. People who make the trains run on time. People with lots of Gantt charts all around them.
Several years ago, when I was a junior engineer just out of university, a PM wandered by my desk on his way to a meeting one morning. “Uh, hey, we’re having a meeting about Project Jabberwocky, uh, right now, can you come?” He was already past my desk and did a last-second pivot to extend the invitation. I was…
In front of me is something that feels impossible: This is a legal, officially sanctioned DVD of the movie CODA, an Apple Original (Apple Inc.’s name for their exclusive original movies on th…
Reflections after one month with a feature phone
