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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 669 posts.
Like almost all rules, there are cases where breaking them is a good idea and seasoned writers may well object with "but" responses for some of these. Thus, consider the rules below as mental rumble strips - you should probably slow down and think if you encounter these cases.
Nature finds a way.
Bees have a dance to indicate to others where food is. It’s called the waggle dance. Great name. But a significant portion of bees in a hive completely ignore the waggle dance and venture off on their own accord. Scientists studied this and were perplexed as to why. It
Introduction We spend huge amounts of time sweating the details of our products. We want to remove all the friction we can from using them and want to make sure we never leave our users confused. To get this right, we do a bunch of things: we use simple language, we make extensive use of context-sensitive…
Thank you to David Peter for your hard work making the world a better place through open source.
A practical guide to starting a personal blog you can keep for years, without depending on social platforms or fragile tools.
This is the first in (maybe) a series of “Tales From Tech Support”, which are true stories from my point of view. I’ll probably only post these on a Friday. In the 1990s, I worked as a contractor for a large, well-established accounting firm. We’d often buy new equipment and unpack it at the helpdesk, throw away all…
Where the hard edge of physics meets the vulnerable metaphysics of the human heart.
Many bad things happened in 2023. You already know them. Many tragic events were so terrible we will never forget them and we shouldn’t. You can easily find them all over the news. But the good things that happened are much harder to encounter, and it is easy to get the impression nothing good happened at all. In…
A guide for fourteen-year-olds and fourteen-year-olds at heart
Within my particular subfield of theoretical computer science there’s perhaps no individual more celebrated than Edsger Dijkstra. His career spanned half-a-century, beginning with a young ... Read more
A speech Bill Watterson gave at Kenyon College, Gambier Ohio, to the 1990 graduating class.
Game development serves as a vibrant canvas for one's creativity. Especially when focusing on small games, which are simple to create and instantly enjoyable, one can quickly immerse oneself in their allure. Through this article, I aim to delve into the joy of crafting small games.
The relentless accumulation (and management) of snow.
Some people have asked me why I blog and why I value writing in general. These are my reasons, in roughly decreasing order of importance to me.
Swipe Right on Your Dream Job
Want to learn something new? Get a personal teacher as soon as possible. If you don't have enough money to pay someone, find a mentor among your friends o...
Personalized learning can feel isolating. Whole class learning can feel personal. This is hard to understand.
Engineering, Robotics, AI, Technology
Exploratory interfaces for navigating photos
(Originally published online in Huffington Post's Healthy Living section.) Vitamin D is an essential vitamin that boosts the immune system and plays vital roles in human metabolism. Did you know that tasty mushrooms are one source for vitamin D, and that you can naturally multiply their levels by exposing them to sunli
Social media aggravates the ego. Virtuous content drifts to the extremes and becomes counter productive at scale. Focusing on external validation is futile and robs the soul of a deeper meaning.
Transcription of the Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar 7 March 1986
(Spoiler alert: it has been very successful, but there are some lessons to be learned)
