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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,940 posts.
Editor’s note: Due to the sheer amount of interesting material here we decided to break this into a two-part article. All across Japan, one sight remains ubiquitous – the convenience store. A far, far cry from their American cousins, convenience stores in Japan are without exception, spotless, well-stocked,
Timo Zimmermann talking about software engineering, leading teams, consulting and start ups.
Patrick Honner tweeted a few days ago: My 7 yo pointed out that our 300 piece puzzle actually contains 18 x 18 = 324 pieces and I just don’t know what to believe anymore. — Patrick Honner (@M…
You can't force luck. But you can increase your chances (by a lot) to get lucky. Here's how to do it with luck surface area.
I was talking recently to a friend about a video essayist I like, (Dan Olson of Folding Ideas) and when asked why I thought he was any good I pondered it for a moment and said “he has a lot of respect for complexity”. On reflection, I think that is one of the virtues I […]
Someone recently introduced me a weird and wonderful little board game that has become my latest obsession. It's a game for 2-12 players where horses race...
I dropped out of school when I was 16 years old. School was not for me. To me, computers were so much more interesting. Right or wrong, I felt like I wasted my time there and my real education was starting when I came home. I lost respect for the institution and of course this meant that I no longer bothered to put any
The “startup” world is bursting with bullshit (or, if you prefer, ‘unicorn dust’). There are bullshit peddlers on every blog-corner. They don’t want
"G’mar Chatimah Tovah” – May you be inscribed into the Book of Life
I find that I operate in one of two modes when I’m writing software. I’m either approaching a project as a quick hack or as developing software . As much as anything else, this affects how I approach the project and what kinds of results that I get.
We should encourage more public disagreement.
Going indie looks like freedom from the outside. But once you’re in it, you face loneliness, pressure, constant decisions, user feedback, and all the invisible work no one warns you about. This is what the journey feels like, and why it’s still worth it.
This is a story of a most unexpected journey — one that is just starting. If somebody had told me four years ago that I’d be writing this today, I would have stared at them in astonishment or laughed dismissedly. Yet here I am, writing about a late-found hobby that has somehow become a very important part of my life.
One of the most interesting pieces I’ve come across lately was Hugh Eakin’s piece on the backstory of one of Picasso’s most prominent works, Guernica. During the creative process for Guernica, Picasso created 45 different sketches before settling on the final direction of the painting: Guernica debuted in 1937 at the…
by Laurence Chen There is a famous quote: Programming is thinking, not typing. After doing this job long enough, sometimes, I feel I am doing too much typing. No matter whether...
The most valueble code in my repo, is the code I didn't write.
I encounter this feeling frequently. I have a sudden need (or idea) and I realize that such and such a tool or service must already exist. As a software engineer, I’ve learned to not let that feeling pass. Usually, it’s a chance to learn something (because usually it does exist) and sometimes it’s a chance to to build…
The common way to talk about happiness is as a single scale: unhappy at one end, neutral in the middle, happy at the other end. I think that model is wrong.
1. In the 1970s, the philosophers Samuel Gorovitz and Alasdair MacIntyre published a short essay on the nature of human fallibility that I read during my surgical training and haven’t stopped...
Let me tell you about a language. But if you wish to go play instead go here. It's going to get a little abstract below. There is a Canvas to Compose Upon The canvas is a square with the largest circle that has a radius of ρ. There are
Raymond Chandler would have loved generative AI
As of today I’ve completed my fifth course at Coursera, all but one being directly related to Machine Learning. The fact that you can now take classes given by many of most well known researchers i…
Thinking is split roughly into pattern matching against experience, and reasoning from first principles. Here's one argument for why you need both.
