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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,927 posts.
Last year I did a year in review post, so by doing it again this year I am turning it into a tradition. This is more for me (to see my own progress) than it is for you, but I hope you can learn something as well. If you want to read last years you […]
A story from 16 years ago - trust, tech, and a server that had to disappear. They offered me a blank check. I said no.
A website supporting the books of author Simon Monk.
Writing serves as a foundation for clarity in thought. It can help you engage more deeply with your ideas.
One financial lesson they should teach in school is that most of the things we buy have to be paid for twice. There’...
There is a weird collection of arguments for appraising the value of humans and their creative artifacts. It usually goes something like this: In the age of AI, we should still prefer humans in certain roles because AI could never perform the tasks required for that role. Or, a human can at least do it better. Or…
In 1985, I was a freshman at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. The college had a VAX 11/780 running 4.2BSD and a PDP-11/70 running v7 with some Berkeley and local code hacked in. It was my first exper…
Yet another calm weekend after months of lockdowns and I sit down to enjoy a book. After turning a couple of pages, I'm no longer able to keep going. In-between, I've managed to look at my phone four times and I've had my thoughts wander away. Why does something so simple feel suddenly so difficult?
Much of what I do, in multiple fields, could be reduced to one skill: troubleshooting. I’ll define troubleshooting as systematically determining the cause of unwanted behaviour in a system, and fixing it. Troubleshooting is often learned tacitly, in the process of explicitly learning “the skill”. Troubleshooting is…
Many writers anecdotally report they write best first thing early in the morning, apparently even if they are not morning people. Do they, and why?
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
My daughter asked me: “Daddy, what’s the tallest structure we can build with those 4 pieces?”
I can't play an instrument, so I worked out music theory in JavaScript instead. Twelve notes, scales and chords, derived from scratch with code you can hear.
Here’s an experiment for a true daredevil. Sit there for a three minutes, following two rules:
I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that you, like me, have a large pile (or digital equivalent) of books or articles you've been meaning to get around to reading, plus maybe a long queue of podcast episodes to which you'd love to listen, if only you had the time. It's the archetypal "first-world problem", I…
As a consequence of scanning thousands of slides, I learned quite a bit about taking photos that capture a family’s life. Here’s a personal…
This HTML version of Think Bayes is provided for convenience, but it is not the best format for the book. In particular, some of the math symbols are not rendered correctly.
What can Reddit comment data tell us about the rules governing the formation of insulting compound words like 'fartface', 'scumwad', or 'assgoblin'?
UPDATE, 10:56PM CT: THE POWER OF THE INTERNET SAVED THE DAY. All of the bags of caffeinated coffees sold out. That’s approximately 24,000 bags of coffee. You all are amazing! We are overwhelmed with gratitude and will update tomorrow. Hopefully we can find these lonely bags of decaf a good home, too. We’ve had a…
The best way to learn a new programming language, just like a human language, is from example. To learn how to write code you first need to read someone else’s code. But who is the best person to learn from? Which code should we read? Where should we look to find it?
