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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 668 posts.
This is a story about Imagebin. Imagebin is the longest-lived software project that I still maintain. I'm the only user. I use it to host images, mainly to include in my blog, sometimes for sharing in other places. Imagebin's oldest changelog entry is dated May 2010, but I know it had already existed for about a year…
Where I analyse the nootropic ratings I gathered through my recommender system.
Just a few personal thoughts. Notes to myself, to people who use and love this app everyday.
After all you made your apps open source, so I can remove your ads.
I entered the data visualization field in 2012, when D3.js had just come out and interactive graphics were going through a digital Renaissance. By the time I was fully steeped in the field in 2016, it felt like a new, experimental project was coming out every week—each one pushing the boundaries of how we think about…
This blog post is based on the work BaNEL: Exploration Posteriors for Generative Modeling Using Only Negative Rewards. Tackling Very Hard Problems The ultimate aim of machine learning research is to push machines beyond human limits in critical applications, including the next generation of th
September 15 update: @YouTubeInsider confirmed that the issue is related to viewers who have adblockers enabled—YouTube's been in an arms race with ad blocking tools, and the fallout is a substantial cut in counted views for creators who have a large audience watching from desktop. Many YouTube content creators…
E ven before I started pressing buttons for a living I was always a pretty heavy computer user. When I was about 18 I started experiencing symptoms of RSI. At around the same time I learnt of the Dvorak keyboard layout, and so I switched, hoping it would solve my problems. It did, at least at the time, and so for the…
The Four Daily Practices That Changed How I Live and Work
WHEREAS , the em-dash (—) has long served as the elegant scaffolding of the English sentence, providing the necessary breadth for parenthetical thought, sudden turns of phrase, and rhythmic pause;
They usually aren't light, and they certainly aren't small, but the unique perspective a telephoto lens brings makes it an indispensable part of your kit, even when traveling. Let's review some shots taken with a telephoto to see how we can justify its size and weight.
In the 1960s, AI researchers tried - and failed - to deliver machine translation of Russian to English. Overly confident researchers, lazy journalists and far too optimistic tech utopianists all built expectations that couldn't be met. Eventually, the lack of results put a stop to the previously generous funding. The…
🎵 Back in 1991, Nevermind become an unexpected critical and commercial sensation.
I was recently thinking about the huge number of ways you can shuffle a deck of 52 cards and wondered if it would be possible to store arbitrary data.
Welcome to the award show everyone! Hosted by your favourite bee... Bee! 🥳 I wanted to summarise the best tools etc out there in 2025, and what better way then to put on a fake award show! And like all true award shows and Christmas themed events, let's get into
Gather round the fire, everyone, and let me tell you a story. It has everything you could want in a Christmas blockbuster: superheroes and villains, a car crash, children singing, a mystery to solv…
I am putting this out into the ether to see if anyone wants to join me, in any capacity, in some kind of accountability structure (following each others blog...
In more than thirty years as a writer, editor, and publisher, I have, to my best reckoning, introduced, abridged, issued or reissued, and read nearly every major work of inspirational literature produced or translated into English.
A year ago I decided to help build a service business for my mom because I wanted to learn about marketing and business. One of the largest blindspots engineers have is around sales and marketing. I was determined to not fall into this trap, but marketing seemed like a skill I couldn’t just learn by […]
Guidelines for creating a living personal Web site.
New study finds rumination can cause those with depression to get ‘stuck’ on thoughts, limiting their ability to mentally juggle options available to them when making decisions.
BU study finds memories of mundane incidents can be strengthened when they get attached to a memory of an emotionally charged event
We thought it was important for the user to be able to invoke every menu command directly from the keyboard, so we added a special key to the keyboard to invoke menu commands, just like our predecessor, Lisa. We called it the "Apple key"; when pressed in combination with another key, it selected the corresponding menu…
AI Agents, Modularity, and Alignment
This is my second article about some curious fansubbing techniques that I found when watching anime. Want to know what they are? Read on to find out!
where my words occasionally escape /dev/null
Steve Jobs often came by Texaco Towers after dinner, to see what was new, and we'd usually show him whatever recent progress we made. Sometimes he'd be pissed off about something, but other times he'd be really excited about a new idea.
