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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,935 posts.
For the past six months I have been sending out a weekly newsletter with things I learnt and read during the week. Some of those trivia are not trivial at all, so I decided to share the condensed crème de la crème of the Internet in this New Year special edition.
I was just chatting with a friend that is a successful entrepreneur, advisor , and angel investor. He has 1700 unread emails in his inbox. 1700!
CHM remembers Fellow Don Bitzer, computer pioneer who co-invented the flat-panel plasma display and was called the "father of PLATO.”
The first time I heard about Flat Earthers, I thought the idea was a joke. Surely nobody would believe something so crazy. I didn’t think about it again for a while. Until I started seeing celebrities, including famous basketball players, claiming the world is flat The rise of this phenomenon puzzled and concerned me…
A bunch of reasons to write code in 2026
In 2017 the company I worked for in Toronto got acquired by Yelp. The software engineers in my company (including myself) were asked to move to San Francisco. At the end of 2017 we moved, and I spent most of 2018 there. With the year coming to an end, I thought it might be a good time to reflect on my time there.
Why the poorest people in the world spend fortunes burying their dead
This page describes the errors that I have seen most frequently in undergraduate mathematics, the likely causes of those errors, and their remedies.
Engineers earn more money than we need, and the world is full of interesting problems that don’t promise a financial return. Why are the…
Soon after I launched this blog in February 2005, I signed up for Google AdSense. My goal was to make a little money and learn about the industry from the inside. In particular, if I was going to cover the...
Transactions are mundane and commonplace. Have we forgotten why they're useful?
Recently ASAP Science released a video called "The ONLY face cream that works! – according to science". A lot of people asked me to do a response, so here it is on YouTube (keep scrolling for the text…
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And…
My name and email address can be found in the VPN client application made by Cisco called AnyConnect. They are present there as part of the curl license, because this product - like thousands of others - uses libcurl. My name appears in many products. Apparently, people often have problems finding an appropriate…
We all eventually suffer from "lazy expert syndrome." The best way to snap out of it and grow is to mentor someone new to your field.
I'm finishing a new edition of my Refactoring book. Here's details and periodic memos about my work.
This post was written as a reflection at the first Dev Writers Retreat. It's been really weird doing this in the PermaParty city while the world seemingly falls apart outside.…
Sitting for more than 1 hour has been shown to induce biochemical changes in lipoprotein lipase activity (an enzyme involved in fat metabolism) and in glucose metabolism that leads to the deposit of fats in adipose tissue rather than these being metabolized by muscle, and extensive sitting also relates to heart…
This 100-year-old binary classification of human interaction holds us back. It's time to move past it.
It was the 28th of June, 2020; the perfect summer day. I remember it distinctly because of two important events that took place on that day. The first was the unfortunate discovery that I am highly sensitive to the venomous hairs of the Oak processionary caterpillar. If you’ve never wished you could use a cheese…
