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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 342 posts.
The artificial construction of reality was to play a key role in the new form of global intelligence which would soon emerge among human beings. If the group brain's "psyche" were a beach with shifting dunes and hollows, individual perception would be that beach's grains of sand. However this image has a hidden snag …
This is an essay about what it means to teach a kid to program, using Seymor Paperts groundbreaking book Mindstorms as a reference.
A few months ago I set myself the challenge to recreate this photo (shot by Masashi Wakui) By modeling it in 3d! At the end I had this (I promise no IRL cats w…
How do you become an expert? Here's an interview with the professor who created the 10,000 hours theory of expertise that will teach you how to be the best.
The Recurse Center is a free, self-directed, educational retreat for people who want to get better at programming, whether they've been coding for three decades or three months.
The Curmudgeonly Optimist People are sometimes confused about my personal relationship with digital communication technologies. On the one hand, I’m a computer scientist who studies and improves these tools. ... Read more
I built a prawn trap from lawyer cane, sticks and vine. Then I caught some prawns and ate them. Prawn (and fish) traps are simple traps designed to catch aquatic life due to their shape. It consist…
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
One sign that technology markets often exhibit at the tail end of a cycle is a fast diversification of the types of startups getting funded. For example, following the core internet boom of the late 90s (Google, Yahoo!, eBay, PayPal), in early 2000 and 2001 there was a sudden diversification and investment into P2P…
Archived MIT Admissions blog post 'An MIT Underwear Exposé (and Sorting Hat),' published April 11, 2016. Preserved for historical context; not maintained as current admissions policy.
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. (Susan Ertz, “Anger in the Sky”) There is a particularly dangerous occupational haz…
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
After a few years teaching a beginners course, I realized that using creativity is a great motivator to learn programming. Even in a technical field like software engineering, even with logic-driven students, the desire to create and express oneself is stimulating and inspiring.
I have been doing app development since 2009. Initially as a hobby, then as part time work, and now as my full time job. It wasn’t until last year, however, that I found out there was an entire developer community out there supporting one another. That’s when I discovered conferences.
I got a very earnest and well-phrased email from a young person overseas ...
What happens if you Google “coworking space”? You see people working hard. I see lots of necks, backs, arms, wrist and hands that will need phyiscal therapy in…
This post used to contain an early version of the introduction to my previous book, The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek. I’m now working on an updated iteration.
