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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 282 posts.
Every now and again, someone emails me and asks for very general advice. ("How do I change the world?") With the caveat that I've only lived a fraction of one life, and am still trying to figure things out, here's the advice I'd give past me.
In May 2017, I sat and passed the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi Level 4. The HSK is a Mandarin Chinese proficency test similar to the TOEFL, and passing Level 4 mean...
In every off-season teams in every sport begin a strange ritual. Prospective coaches are flown in to meet with management about open positions — sometimes they convene at the stadium, in nondescript conference rooms, or the cabin of the owner’s plane. Whatever the locale, the scene is usually thus: The ambitious coach…
For ten out of the last eleven years, I’ve lived in two places: New York City and San Francisco. The last two years have been in NYC. After founding Ursa Labs , a not-for-profit open source development group, I felt it was time to make my home somewhere that isn’t either of those places. After some contemplation and…
Mostly it's a testimony that it's possible to have a successful career in computer science without taking military funding. My position has its roots in the Vietnam War, when I was a conscientious objector, did alternative service instead of submitting to the draft, and joined the Society of Friends (Quakers). During…
Sometimes an insignificant interaction, or an excerpt from a book, is capable of provoking a life-changing insight. It might be an obvious lesson, but it feels epiphanic because it fits differently into my understanding of things. For instance…
One day in the mid-1920s, a Moscow newspaper reporter named Solomon Shereshevsky entered the laboratory of the psychologist Alexander Luria. Shereshevsky's boss at the newspaper had noticed that Shereshevsky never needed to take any notes, but somehow still remembered all he was told, and had suggested he get his…
I don’t know if it helps, but Illinois CS distinguishes the two kinds of programs with two different degrees: MS in CS for the research program, and MCS for the coursework program. Most of the MS students receive funding andtuition waivers, while I’m not sure if the MCS students are even eligible for support.
An update on my progress since going off to work on my own.
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Programmers tend to worry too much and too soon about performance. Many college-level Computer Science classes focus on fancy algorithms to improve performance, but in real life performance rarely matters. Most real-world programs run plenty fast enough on today's machines without any particular attention to…
Two decades ago when I first started working at Avid, one of the tasks I was assigned was porting our product (a consumer video editor - th...
The paper Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure , by A. Pluchino. A. E. Biondo, and A. Rapisarda, has been receiving a lot of positive reception lately.
What follows is a scrap of trivia . . . my collection of RPG plots , in abstract form. I built this by examining the premises of hundreds o...
Skill stacking is a strategy that you can use to achieve career success. You can use it whether you want to build a business or have a dream job.
I recently purchased an original Macintosh User Manual (thanks eBay !). I had seen one at a garage sale, and was struck by how it had to explain a total paradigm shift in interacting with computers. I figured I could learn something about helping make innovation happen.
Master the Feynman Technique: Nobel laureate's 4-step learning method to understand anything deeply through teaching, simplification, and systematic review.
It’s not every day that I check my office mailbox and, amid the junk brochures, find 500 pages on the biggest questions facing civilization—all of them, basically—by possibly the …
Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker : Effectively speaking, I've always been a Vim user. When I got my first shell account, I started with Vim (In the Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic ages of `vi`, `vim` and `neovim`, I came of age somewhere in the late Jurassic): my
In the midst of my September job hop I headed to Kazan for the weekend. I don't know exactly why — probably because I could. I had a hotel booked via booking.com, but once I arrived there the receptionist told me it was the first time he's heard of my booking, and he told me that they had no more rooms, and he told me…
"It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle." -
I was in Taipei the past few weeks working on a documentary with friends. Because of a busy schedule, it wasn't like my usual travels abroad for fun, it felt more like a work trip. Still, even if I'd been there purely for vacation, I would've wanted to try a different mode of travel, one less focuse
