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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,940 posts.
After seven years at Google, I'm leaving. Cue the inevitable 'what's wrong with you?' Before I get to the gripes, though, there are a few popular narratives I want to push back on: that Google has gone evil, that the good engineers are all defecting to Facebook, that 20% time was always a myth. Part one of three. The…
If at first you don’t succeed, goes the old saying, try, try again. Good advice, up to a point. But let me offer a modification: even when you do succeed, try, try again. Tempting as it is to decla…
Something has changed, permanently, in me. I’ve been trying to figure out how to express it, because the transformation has been so interesting, unexpected...
When artist Robert Sikoryak put the iTunes Terms and Conditions into graphic novel format, he tapped a familiar problem. Most of us don’t read the terms
The first and only mention of Gumption Theory in modern writing is found towards the end of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The author sets out a plain and uncomplicated approach to attaining and maintaining the state of mind required to repair a motorcycle. It takes about 20 pages. And the…
I’ve been taking photos of benches for years. Sometimes on purpose because I find them intriguing and I have an thing for objects designed for people but without anybody using them, sometimes just because they were there next to my subject. Last year, looking at these photographs, I noticed something I didn’t know…
IMPORTANT : this blog post is correct as of 15 December 2021, and all the text below is unchanged since then. At that time two borders - Russia to China, and China to Laos - could not be crossed due to COVID. The outbreak of war in Ukraine has also meant that trains
These are 80's-era erasable programmable read-only memories, or EPROMs. They were an immensely popular way to store firmware for embedded systems when the
Hey, I feel like I'm at a big crossroads and this is an important blog post, but you probably already guessed that from the title.
We have a new vehicle, a Honda Odyssey Elite customised for my wheelchair, and for me to drive with hand controls.
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…
David shares how to make the best choices of what to work on in your life. Read here.
something not often talked about is the barrier that seemingly exists between the self and other people. that almost impermeable barrier, where you try to co...
Works for me. I’m down. Absolutely.
"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." - Thomas Jefferson
You can now sign up for ‘How to Solve It with Code’, which is a course in how to solve problems (including coding, writing, sysadmin, and research) using fast short iterations, and also provides a platform that makes this approach easier and more effective.
Why is San Francisco, one of the most liberal, environmentally conscious cities in the country, systematically shutting down recycling centers that have been so important to reducing litter and offering low income individuals a safety net?
Is a million times a million a billion or is it a trillion ? For my entire childhood, it was a billion, only for me to grow up and realise, as an adult, that it had better be a trillion!
The Enrichment side of the "Accelerate vs Enrich" dichotomy in math education for kids who love math.
