A recent Hacker News thread, "Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?" , prompts me to dust off this article that I’ve had sitting in my drafts folder for about four years now and haven’t be
Every man should know how to build a fire. But every outdoor situation requires different types of campfire lays (set-ups in the firewood), so it’s imperative to know how to make more than one kind. H
I asked a bunch of people (~19k) what kinks they were into, and as an almost-afterthought asked people what quadrant of the political compass they were on. Almost all the political-fetish correlations
Willingness to look stupid People frequently 1 think that I'm very stupid. I don't find this surprising, since I don't mind if other people think I'm stupid, which means that I don't adjust my behavio
Project estimation is a black art, nowhere more so than in game development. I once heard of a mysterious cabal of numerologists that multiplied their time
The world wide web has become an annoying, ultra-commercialized space. Manywebsites today are prioritizing the interests of the company behind the domain,at the expense of the user’s experience and we
Well I’m in the working world again. I’ve found myself a well-paying gig in the engineering industry, and life finally feels like it’s returning to normal after my nine months of traveling. Because I
I routinely make a fool of myself when I tell friends I want a Martin Baker ejection seat as a chair in my living room. Of course, with the pyrotechnic charge removed. Seriously, I would totally buy i
Cultural differences create a lot of misunderstanding in communications between Westerners, particularly Americans, and Russians. In this mini-ethnography I present the main differences in perception
March 2021 Summary: I believe that small websites are compelling aesthetically, but are also important to help us resist selling our souls to large tech companies. In this essay I present a vision for
I’ve long been impressed by shell one-liners. They seem like magical incantations. Pipe a few terse commands together, et voilà ! Out pops the solution to a problem that would seem to require pages of
Microsoft is cool again, or so the trends would have you think. Microsoft is not an okay company, despite their deliberate efforts to improve their reputation in recent years. Collaboration with US mi
Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret "And as for this non-college bullshit I got two words for that: learn to fuckin' type" — Mr. Pink This is another one I've wanted to write forever. Man, I've tried
This story is assembled from contemporaneous first-person accounts. As such, quotations contain some antiquated spellings, grammar, and phrasing. In the Earth’s extreme southern latitudes, where the P
To read an annotated version of this article, complete with interviews with scientists and links to further reading, click here . I. ‘Doomsday’ Peering beyond scientific reticence. It is, I promise, w
In August of 2015, my hands stopped working. I could still control them, but every movement accumulated more pain, so every motion came with a cost: getting
More people should do what I’m doing right now. They should sit at their computers and bat the cursor around — write full sentences about themselves and the things they care about. I have a selfish re
Open-plan offices offer few pleasures; one of them is snooping on other people’s browsing habits. When, years ago, I began working for tech companies in San Francisco, I noticed that my co-workers were always scrolling through a beige, text-only Web site that resembled a nineteen-nineties Internet…
The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mi
07.28. 2019 Australians have an odd relationship with Antarctica. The fact that there's an even less hospitable piece of territory further to the south seems to soothe the young country, reassuring th
Last New Year’s Eve was my first in Berlin. We live at the edge of Wedding, a neighborhood just north of the city center that, counter to what its name evokes, is gritty and sprawling, studded with public housing and betting parlors. A photo of our block from August, 1961, when it was part of West…
A long, long time ago, that is, in days of film photography, it was a rather difficult task to learn how to produce properly exposed pictures. There was no instant feedback and the only way to see how
How to assess the quality of garments: A beginner's guide What's the number one prerequisite to building a high-quality wardrobe? Exactly: You need to be able to recognize a quality garment when you s
How to assess the quality of garments part II: Seams, tailoring, linings & details As promised, here comes part II of the quality beginner's guide: all about assessing seams, linings, tailoring and de
I think I amat least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me forproductivity tips. So I decided to just write them all down in one place. Compoundgrowth gets discussed as a
André Staltz The Web began dying in 2014, here's how 30 Oct 2017 Before the year 2014, there were many people using Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Today, there are still many people using services from
08.20. 2011 I just finished a summer studying Arabic at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, an enjoyable adventure that I hope to write about in more detail later. MIIS offers a nine-wee
Next post Previous post Last week’s obituaries of Dennis Ritchie focused, naturally, on his creation of C and his co-creation, with Ken Thompson, of Unix. I want to talk about something else: the rema
Former Google software engineer James Damore. Photo: Peter Duke By James Damore Aug. 11, 2017 3:54 pm ET I was fired by Google this past Monday for a document that I wrote and circulated internally ra
By now, most of us have heard about Google's so-called "anti-diversity" manifesto and how James Damore, the engineer who wrote it, has been fired from his job. Titled Google's Ideological Echo Chamber
Editor’s note: This story contains explicit language. And some spoilers. The goal was for the aggression to stay on the blacktop at Baltimore’s neighborhood-famous Cloverdale Courts . Proposition Joe’
meshaphoto / Getty / Konstantin Orlov / Shutterstock / Katie Martin / The Atlantic Y ou were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that’s ever been published. Books still
I am reprinting this from an email I received from Malidoma Some , a west African Shaman whom I’ve had the privilege to meet, drive around Boulder, and work for for two days. Since I am going through
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