What use is mental math in 2022?
The ability to quick estimates is still valuable, maybe more valuable than it used to be.
Topics /
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,746 posts.
The ability to quick estimates is still valuable, maybe more valuable than it used to be.
TL;DR: After the analysis in this post, I started using SLANT/PRICE/DOUGH/BALMY, but it may not be the best sequence for you.
One of the persistent myths in America is that success is primarily down to hard work. Yes, you cannot have success by lying on the Sofa…
Can’t bring yourself to slaughter a nearby village, or a long-time associate?
Special thanks to Morgan Beller, Juan Benet, Eli Dourado, Karl Floersch, Sriram Krishnan, Nate Soares, Jaan Tallinn, Vincent Weisser, Balvi volunteers and others for feedback and review.
The story of why I stopped taking photos
I receive a fair amount of email from strangers. My email address is public, which doesn’t seemto be a popular choice these days, but I’ve received enough inspiring correspondence over the yearsto leave it be.When I receive a GPG encrypted email from a stranger, though, I immediately get the fee...
A Reckoning for Social Psychology
I received a review copy of Steven Levy's seminal book Hackers back in the 1980s, but never read it. I did, though, keep it, because it lo...
I recently had an engaging conversation with Alex ( @veqq ) from the Lobsters community about computing, mathematics and a range of related topics. Our conversation was later published on the community website as Lobsters Interview with Susam .
LA CAMPAGNE NUMERO DEUX : Why do we, French people, care so much about the presidential election — and why it all goes back to cheese.
Including a little dive into the physics behind it
A Vim-Inspired Approach to Efficient Note Management with Obsidian and Markdown
Cycling Lessons Learned From Amsterdam That No One Talks About This post originally appears on Spacing Vancouver. By Darren Proulx and Samuel Baron I recently had the honour of visiting Amsterdam. …
The site of Sid
over the last few years, many attempts have been made at creating a smart cane. None of them have successfully lead to a market transforming technology that's actually used by any substantial users. I
The what is connected to the when.
This is the fifth post in my series on finding an alternative to Mac OS X. A bit over a year ago I wrote about my search for an alternative to Mac OS and switch to Linux. In this post I reflect on how that year went and detail some further adventures into Mac OS alternatives.
A startup CTO's guide to what "the best" really means—how to spot non-obvious high performers and the traits that make early-stage teams win.
[ed note: this article is also available in pdf and postscript and as a Microsoft Word document . ]
About eight years ago, I was playing a game of Codenames where the game state was such that our team would almost certainly lose if we didn't correctly guess all of our remaining words on our turn. From the given clue, we were unable to do this. Although the game is meant to be a word guessing game based on word…