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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 465 posts.
A year ago today I self-published “A Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics” (PIM). In this short note I want to describe the success it’s had, summarize the complaints of some readers and the praise of others, and outline what’s next. Since publication PIM has sold over 11,000 copies. A rough chart showing the…
A year ago today, weighing nearly 200 pounds and feeling physically run down, and also feeling somewhat depressed about those facts, I hauled my carcass up on the treadmill we have in our basement …
The first step to AI - data democratisation
If I was setting up curriculum at a university I’d make an entire semester-long class on The Challenger disaster, and make it required for any remotely STEM-oriented major. Because I think it…
The following are suggestions for the best magazine articles (in English) ever. Stars denote how many times a correspondent has suggested it. Submitter comments are in italics. For a great way to read long-form magazine articles on a tablet device see my review of LongForm and Instapaper here .
Two winters ago I was told a story by a friend of mine. A true story, about an episode from his childhood he’d never mentioned befor...
Last year for National Novel Writing Month I trained a neural net called torch-rnn on 10,096 unique ways to begin a novel. It came up with some intriguing possibilities, my personal favorite being “I am forced to write to my neighbors about the beast.” But many of its sentences used made-up words, or had such weird…
Introduction to Interslavic — Vvod v medžuslovjansky jeazy — Ввод в меджусловјански језык
I recently read Venkat’s synopsis of the book Seeing like a state, which I followed up by an excellent blog post titled The Meridian of Her Greatness. Venkat challenged people to summarize the most important ideas from that post in a tweetstorm. He said if it gets more than 100 likes, on Twitter he’ll give… Read More
The first task of last week's Weekly Challenge was to print the first ten strong and weak primes. A prime p n is "strong" if it's larger than the average of its two neighbouring primes ( i.e. p n > (p n-1 +p n+1 )/2 ). A prime is "weak" if it's smaller than the average of its two neighbours.
If you've ever thought of publishing a tech book then read up on my experiences writing HTTP/2 in Action for Manning.
I’ve written previously about various aspects of imprisonment, including practical preparations such as packing your personal possessions (r...
So, about a decade ago I wrote an essay on this blog about the writing of the Merchant Princes series (at that point, six slim novels—the Empire Games follow-on trilogy wasn't more than a daydream back then), in which I tried to pin down what I'd learned about writing a series.
First published Jan. 17, 2019; updated Nov. 15, 2019 Let me briefly tell my Linux story. If you're thinking about moving to Linux, and wondering how you'd do so, it might give you some pointers and inspiration. The back story My first introduction to the command line was in the 80s when I f
The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” I wonder if he would have said so if his native language wasn’t German. Whether one agrees with it or not (I personally would do so partially!), there’s some modern neuroscience that backs important portions…
Think better. Grow your audience. Accelerate your career.
Grey thinking works. Reality is all grey area. All of it. There are very few black and white answers and no solutions without second-order consequences.
Ryan MacInnes is a web developer, programmer, and designer in Los Angeles, CA. He loves working on Ruby on Rails projects, Javascript and iOS. His forte is large, scalable and highly interactive web applications with a beautiful minimal approach to UI and UX.
0: Introduction This is from businessstudent.com: Acceptance rates at top colleges have declined by about half over the past decade or so, raising concern about intensifying academic competition. T…
Instead of taking all my vacation at once, I decided to see what a 4-day work week would look like. It taught me a lot about myself and how I work.
