Best of 2012

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2012. 2,098 posts.

Any topic
1383

Feynman's Clock

You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive. – Richard Feynman, to his wife, Arlene Richard Feynman is famous for his ceaseless questioning of life and the universe, to a degree unexpected even for being a Nobel Prize quantum physicist. His dogged investigation of the Challenger explosion is the most…

1390

How To Die With No Regrets

The raft entered the rapid, heading directly toward the rock wall, and bouncing up and down through the waves. I heard the guide yelling something about leaning in and holding on. The side of the raft hit the rocks and was thrust by the strong current further up the wall. The four people who were sitting across on…

1398

Cache Them If You Can

I always smile when I hear a web performance speaker say this. I forget who said it first, but I’ve heard it numerous times at conferences and meetups over the past few years. It’s true! Caching is critical for making web pages faster. I’ve written extensively about caching:

1403

How To Be A Horrible Boss

I’ve been working in the tech sector for over two decades now. That means I’ve had more bosses than I can remember. The ones who left an indelible impression in my brain were in the extremes: either great or horrible. There are many books written about how to be a great boss, for example Managing Humans . Today I’m…

1404

Don't use Scatterplots

In a series of blog posts, Gary Rubinstein attempts show that the Value Added Modelling scores recently released by the NYC Department of Education prove that VAM (Value Added Modelling) is not accurate. However, whatever flaws VAM may have, Gary Rubinstein (henceforth GR) hasn't demonstrated them. All he has…

1406

Ingress

It’s a new thing on the Internet, a planetary-scale augmented-reality game being played on a real planet: ours. It’s fun to play, particularly if you have kids. And interesting, I think, for anyone who cares about issues of Life Online, even non-gamers.