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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 8,929 posts.
I Was Told I Was Very Smart
Your life is the best story! Just start your blog today!
Estimating square roots in your head
Imagine we want to compute the square root of a number n n n . The basic idea of Heron’s method , named after the mathematician and engineer, Heron of Alexandria, is to find a number g g g that is close to n \sqrt{n} n and to then average that with the number n / g n/g n / g , which corrects for the fact that g g g…
I wired up my bike's GPS to order me pizza during a gravel race
As harvest season begins here in the Midwest, I once again celebrate by grinding Nebraska gravel at the Gravel Worlds Long Voyage bike race. As in previous years ( 2021 ) ( 2022 ), I spent more time writing code for a marginally-useful project than I did training. But hey, I finished!
Hacking The Status Game
I was taking an improv class, and the instructor gave us a game to play before getting on stage, so that we can turn off our over-rationalizing minds and get into the flow. The game was called Status , and it went like this:
MMM Receives Legal Threats
Sigh. I suppose this was bound to happen sometime. This blog is approaching its third birthday and has been blessed with over 62 million page views from 5.2 million people and counting. Many people…
Sex, Circuits and Deep House
Cari with the Institute Blinky Badge at Burning Man 2015. Photo credit: Nagutron.
40 Days Without Booze
Recently, as a “kick-in-the-butt” motivator, I promised myself that I would abstain from alcoholic beverages until I finished the first draft of a novel I’ve been working on. I had set a target date for completing the project (June 30th), with the idea that if I didn’t finish by that date, I’d stop drinking booze […]
The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom
Why do teachers quit? As I make the tough decision to leave the classroom, I highlight some of the issues that force quality teachers to leave public education.
Interview with gwern
Legacy & Anonymity in the Age of AGI
Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
It’s a throwaway line in a longer talk and we probably shouldn’t make too much of it, but I will anyway. In five years time Facebook “will be definitely mobile,
How Wi-Fi Works
See if you qualify for Fios, 5G Home Internet, or LTE Home Internet with Verizon. View plans, promos, and deals. Plans start at $35/mo.
How to Get Tenure
Even before I got tenure, folks have told me they’re “looking forward to an academic advice post on tenure.”
Software essays that shaped me
I started reading software blogs before I got my first programming job 20 years ago. At this point, I've read thousands of blog posts and essays, but a small handful stuck in my mind and changed the way I think about software.
The two questions I ask every interviewer
Applying the engineering process to software interviews
I learned Haskell in just 15 years
Haskell is a programming language invented sometime in the 20th century by Scottish logicians as a prank. ¹ Fifteen years or so ago, for reasons I can no longer remotely recall, I started learning Haskell. Now, I have finally written a useful program in Haskell, and I am pretty sure I can do it again, if I ever need…
We are all nerds: The literary works of Neal Stephenson
If you and I ever had a longer conversation, chances are that Neal Stephenson might have come up once or twice. As contemporary authors go, Neal’s books are by far the most enthralling on my long and ever-growing reading list. This post is primarily written for people that usually shy away from reading what they…
I made my blog solar-powered, then things escalated
In 2020 I wondered if I could run my blog on solar power , being inspired by Low-tech Magazine , doing the same thing (but better) 1 . The answer was 'yes', but only through spring and summer.
How to earn your macroeconomics and finance white belt as a software developer
Lambdaclass's blog about distributed systems, machine learning, compilers, operating systems, security and cryptography.
The more you learn, the faster you can learn
Throughout my schooling and career, I’ve impressed people over and over again with how quickly I pick up things, especially hard things. For instance, exactly 4y ago I did my first ever interview, got
But yak shaving is fun (2019)
KO | EN | Discussions on HN Alexandr frolov (CC BY-SA 4.0) This blog doesn’t use a static site generator or framework like Jekyll, Hugo, or Gatsby. I tried a few of them at first, but they gave me too little freedom to customize, so I decided to build the blog myself. Early on I just wrote posts in ...