Best of 2012

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2012. 462 posts.

Life, Learning & Writing
331

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…

346

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…

347

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.

354

The desks of 37signals

Perhaps it’s my inner engineer, but seeing behind the scenes of workshops, be they real or digital, always fascinates me. Maybe that’s why How it’s Made is so compelling. The show proves that there’s more than just the end product: the workspace and the process that surround…

359

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…