Best of 2012

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2012. 409 posts.

Life, Learning & Writing
309

Farewell to MIT

I defended my Ph.D. thesis on September 7th, 2011. Technically, I'm still not done for a few complicated reasons, but at this point I am willing to declare victory and say I've graduated. Like most other major events in life, this has caused me to reflect on the past four years, when I quit my job at Google to become…

310

Why 13th Chords

As the background to my music theory is more classical in nature, it used to puzzle me when I saw jazz chords like C9, B♭11 or F13. I mean, I knew what a 9th, 11th and 13th note were but I wondered why you'd call a note a 9th rather than a 2nd, or a 13th rather than a 6th and so on.

321

Seriously?

Business of Software has long stood as a unique conference for me: while nearly every tech conference I attend focuses on the technological side of delivering a solution, Business of Software focuses on actually delivering the goods . How do you reach people? How do you know you’ve reached people? How, if you’ve…