Topics /
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 530 posts.
Humans are notoriously bad at coming up with random numbers. I wanted to be able to quickly generate “random enough” numbers. I’m not looking for anything that great, I just want to be able to come up with the random digits in half a minute. Some looking around brought me to an old usenet post by George Marsaglia…
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2024. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
Welcome to zombocom… you can do anything at zombocom… anything at all… the only limit… is yourself…
Create and run awesome TTRPG adventures. Games, tools, and resources for storytellers, roleplayers, improvisers, and game masters.
The secrets that will make you much better at listening to a degree that your relationships are significantly more successful, peaceful, gratifying, intimate, and trusting, have to do with what you…
Writing is one of the most powerful forms of communication, and it’s useful in a multitude of roles and contexts. As a blog-writing , documentation-authoring , twitter-shitposting DevEx engineer I spend a lot of my time writing. Recently, someone paid me a very nice compliment about a blog I’d written and asked how…
Last winter, I rode a ski lift alongside a guy who claimed to be a retired Olympic ski tuner. Ski tuning, he said, was all a scam. If you keep your skis dry between days out they’ll stay sharp for their entire lifetime. Don’t get him started on waxing. His specific claim was that skis get blunt from corrosion, and all…
A few weeks ago, my friend Ben and I won JumboHack , a hackathon at Tufts University. Our entry generates a Spotify Wrapped-like summary of students’ dining habits by scraping Tufts’ meal plan portal. Through some clever promotion on Ben’s part, we managed to get hundreds of students to use it in just a couple of…
A discussion of why I don’t intend to turn Gwern.net into a book, and how trying to write a book can harm writers.
I'm sleep-deprived, completely exhausted, but incredibly excited about the whole experience. Here are my notes, impressions and a lot of pictures about FOSDEM 2024.
Fresh water from snow, at 70 below!
The more I learn about AI markets, the less I think I know. I list questions and some thoughts.
Japan has 140 businesses that are at least 500 years old.
I began this process on 17 December 2011 and let the tenth anniversary pass without comment, so the time has come to reflect. Firstly, I con...
The first is going to sound bad in a culture where engineers are encouraged to apologize for existing while it is totally acceptable for a grifter that can't code to insist that they're a "thought leader". It is that, in my immediate professional environment, I am consistently acknowledged to be one of the best…
There are few things I think about more than the essays on gwern.net, and there are few with as satisfying a theoretical payout to contemplate in my orb as his essay on “leaky pipelines”, aka log-normal distributions. The skulk: Say you’re working on a Laravel web app. You’re about 90% sure you know how to start the…
The Braun+Design Börse is an annual event and fair focusing on Braun products. Braun might not be the design icon it was 40 years ago, but starting in 1955, it profoundly impacted the design world, starting with its cooperation with the Ulm School of Design. With Dieter Rams as
It’s Never Been Easy to Battle Distraction. Reviewing Jamie Kreiner’s New Translation of John Cassian in ‘How to Focus’
and learn to accept imperfection
By the way, you can listen to me read this post aloud on my Patreon, which starts at $1/month! My 🌶️ spicy take 🌶️ is that I don’t like seeing tech talks live. I get very little out of 95% of…
Garbage in garbage out
Baba Is You is a philosophical video game that facilitates the kind of thinking needed for frontier topics in the sciences of life and mind.
I like hot sauces. My favourite is Ring of fire, a hot sauce that I first encountered in the US. It is a mix of habanero and serrano chillis, tomatoes, vinegar and spices. It is very tasty and (des…
A future you might actually want to live in.
When working remotely, asking for help is often just a few keystrokes away. So it's tempting to "quickly" ask someone for support when you get stuck.
Personal site of Alex Reichert
And how YOU can too!
