151
How to explain infinity to kids
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 282 posts.
152
Technical Writing: Learning from Kernighan
I have in front of me two books that immediately struck me with their similarity: The c Programming Language 1 1 The c Programming Language ; Kernighan & Ritchie; Prentice Hall; 1988. and The awk Programming Language 2 2 The awk Programming Language ; Aho, Kernighan & Weinberger; Addison-Wesley; 1988. Available…
153
Solving My Email Problem
Email is not a messaging protocol. It’s a TODO list. Or at least my inbox is a TODO list and email is the protocol for putting stuff on it. Here’s the problem. It is a s**tty TODO list. Any one of you can put something on my TODO list. And I don’t want that.
154
Making Penicillin at Home
This article explains how to make antibiotics at home in the event of a collapse situation
155
156
From macOS to Windows and WSL
Writings about computing, agents, and the Internet.
157
Frequent versus infrequent developers, in languages and so on
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
158
Today is Esperanto Day – here’s why I learned it
Hey, it's Zamenhofa Tago, otherwise known as Esperanto Book Day. Read on to learn more about the international language and why it's so cool.
159
The Surprising Power of the Long Game
In everything we do, we play the long or the short game. The short game is easy, pleasurable, and offers visible and immediate benefits. But it almost never leads to success. Here's how to play the long game.
160
Reversing the effects of long programming sessions
Programming for long periods is like walking a high tight rope for a really, really long period of time, or at least I imagine it is... ...
161
162
163
Focus on your own shit (2016)
Check Product Hunt. Ahh, crap. Someone just launched an app similar to my product (and we’re still in beta).
164
Teach Programming to become a better programmer
Are you bored with programming? Why not teach it. It’s not enough to speak in mumbo jumbo such as polymorphism, multithreading, typescript, blah blah these words mean nothing to people who don’t know programming.
165
My hiring experience as a submarine sonar operator in the Norwegian Navy
As some of you know I spent a year on a submarine. This is the story about how that came about.
166
Touched (2015)
opera , paintweb , gsoc2009 , linux , mozilla , moodle , firefox , canvas , ubuntu , tutorials .
167
168
169
My name is Wil Wheaton. I live with chronic Depression, and I am not ashamed
I’m about to go speak to NAMI Ohio’s statewide conference, Fulfilling the Promise. These are the remarks I prepared for my speech. Before I begin, I want to warn you that this talk touc…
170
A Layman’s Intro to Western Classical Music
‘Puisque ces mystères me dépassent, feignons d’en être l’organisateur.’ –Jean Cocteau. Click to read Quariety, by anas sabbar, a Substack publication. Launched 6 years ago.
171
Dostoyevsky's “Dream of a Ridiculous Man” (2014)
“And it is so simple… You will instantly find how to live.”
172
173
The Missing Computer Skills of High School Students
It’s been just over fours years since I started mentoring high school students at work , and I recently began mentoring my fourth such student. That’s enough students for me to start observing patterns. Of course, each arrives with different computer knowledge and experience, but there have been two consistent and…
174
Indirection Is Not Abstraction
The concept of abstraction in software development is frequently misunderstood and confused with indirection. This is partially because of the keywords abstract and interface in statically-typed la...
175
176
177
Asterix in Translation: The Genius of Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge
As promised in a previous blog entry, what follows is a discussion of the translation of some of my favourite Asterix gags. The translators’ modus operandi was to include as many jokes in the Engli…
178
Hyperliterature
The vast majority of fiction on the web is nonergodic : stories presented as linear text. Yet, in an age where everyone has a supercomputer in their pocket, literature can take on any shape imaginable. In recent years, some pieces have taken advantage of these capabilities—not as a gimmick, but in a way that is…
179
180
End of the conference era?
Chris Adamson notes a significant contraction in iOS and related conferences recently (via Michael Tsai ).