Ask HN: What are your favorite articles/blog posts of all time? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are your favorite articles/blog posts of all time?

124 pointstomdell35 comments

When I'm feeling down or burned out I used to read "Good and Bad Procrastination"[0].

When I need inspiration I go read "How to Make Wealth"[1].

During my day job where I'm required to study specifications, I found "The Feynman Technique"[2] to be useful in understanding the subject quickly.

From time to time I also read "The Best of edw519: A Hacker News Top Contributor"[3].

I just repeatedly read articles and posts that I like:

[0] - http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

[1] - http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

[2] - http://calnewport.com/blog/2012/10/26/mastering-linear-algeb...

[3] - https://web.archive.org/web/20160304034949/http://v25media.s...

In regards to [1] on wealth, what are your (and everyone else's) thoughts on the following:

> But a very able person who does care about money will ordinarily do better to go off and work with a small group of peers.

That's saying that you'll make more money if you go work (or start) a startup, whereas I've seen some opposite sentiment on HN (don't have specific links, sorry) where people say your expected monetary returns will be higher at GOOG/FB or other big companies because of the high failure chance of startups.

I think Gates, even if he had to give an exclusive license to IBM for DOS, would have come up with an operating system for the other computer companies demanding one. Paul Graham is wrong on how this would have played out.

Gates already had the business model in place for licensing basic to computer manufacturers. It's easy to see he would have extended that to some DOS-like operating system.

Indeed he went onto do precisely that with Windows, leaving OS/2 to IBM and failure.

PG called this one wrong. Gates would still have come to own the industry as he did, whether or not the DOS deal with IBM was exclusive. The computer industry was always set to expand and Gates was always the guy to meet the demand. Gary Kildall had shown by this stage he didn't have what it took to pick up every commercial opportunity offered.

There is a well known open ended interview question - "what happens when you type a url in a browser and hit enter?". I have many a times imagined (I have never been asked this exact question) overwhelming the interviewer with details, that comes in waves, by going deeper and deeper, by asking rhetorical questions like "but what happens there" loudly and not caring what he answers, almost channeling Sheldon Cooper. In this fun scenario , I restricted myself to network stack of the OS and routing mechanism. However, I recently found this article http://danluu.com/navigate-url/ that is much more hardcore. It is now one of my favorite, if not all time.

This is probably the best version of this that I know of: https://plus.google.com/+JeanBaptisteQueru/posts/dfydM2Cnepe

A few months/years ago there was a Github repo that tried to crowdsource this in excruciating detail.

https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when also great

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

1964 - John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.

1965 - Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

http://james-iry.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and...

Steve Yegge's "Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns".

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom...

57 startup lessons from Slava Akhmechet:

http://www.defmacro.org/2013/07/23/startup-lessons.html

I don't think I've ever seen such an accurate, shrewd, and insightful collection of startup wisdom in one place before. Every bullet point in this list could be a book.

I'm reading this one from time to time. Easier said than done, but so true !

"If You Don’t Design Your Career, Someone Else Will"

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4524232

Eight Years Today: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2012/03/eight-years-today.h...

I don't want to do it the injustice of trying to summarize it. I've been reading this blog post for years, here and there.

The problem is "Write a C program of 512 characters or less that returns as large a number as possible." This fantastic reddit comment[0] led me down a rabbit hole that I still haven't dug my way out of.

[0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/csuey/write_a_...

Woah, you don't read something like that every day.

Two great articles from TDWTF:

* Programming Sucks! Or at least, it ought to! [0]

* The Oracle Effect [1]

EDIT - formatting again

[0] http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Programming-Sucks!-Or-At-Lea...

[1] http://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-oracle-effect

"Programming Sucks! Or at least, it ought to!" is one of the best ever written. I make sure to read it every 6 months or so to keep myself grounded

Managing Nerds - http://randsinrepose.com/archives/managing-nerds/

Clay Shirky "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable"

William Deresiewicz "Solitude and Leadership"

The Last Psychiatrist: "How to Create: Motivation for 2010"

http://mlb.nbcsports.com/2014/10/08/sick-of-the-giants-and-t...

Alex Smith Gives Commencement Speech at Utah

It was just reposted a few weeks ago, but I really like Andrej Karpathy's "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks": http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/

http://www.economist.com/node/16479286

This article describes how variations in intelligence has to do with parasite load and nutrition. May explain a lot of the lack of intellectuals and educated individuals in some countries.

I think this one is very insightful and is one of my favorites: http://mindingourway.com/what-sort-of-thing-a-brain-is/

The most insightful post on recruiting ever written:

http://carlos.bueno.org/2014/06/mirrortocracy.html

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?joel.3.219431.12 easily.

"The Right to Privacy" by Warren and Brandeis.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/priva...

This article made me carry a bottle of water with me: http://lifehacker.com/how-to-trick-yourself-into-drinking-mo...

And this is a pretty damn good classic. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/you-matter.h...

Watch a VC use my name to sell a con. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-s...

Getting Rich: from Zero to Hero in One Blog Post http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/02/22/getting-rich-from-...

Another favorite is so minimalist it fits in a tweet!

Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off. https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en

Fred Brook's "No Silver Bullet". I've found it very useful to reason in terms of accidental vs essential complexity and constantly asking myself: is this truly hard or am I just making it hard by using the wrong tool/design/abstraction/architecture etc for the job.

http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszcah/G51ISS/Documents/NoSilverBu...

Awesome blog for people interested in data analytics. http://fivethirtyeight.com/

Clay Shirkey's "Situated Software" http://shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/situated_softw...

It goes on a bit too much so it's not always on point, but at the time I read it I really appreciated it bringing to focus that not every piece of software has to be about millions of users.

"The Duct tape Programmer" By Joel Spolsky is a good one.

It always reminds me that we are here to build software, not design the perfect system. The quote from Zawinski is great

"It was decisions like not using C++ and not using threads that made us ship the product on time."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/09/23.html

Here's one I read recently that I thought was very good in it's simple wisdom. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2016/09/make-somethi...

The verses and the wit from the Irish-Princetonian poet Paul Muldoon on YouTube never fail to bring a broad smile to my face. https://m.youtube.com/results?q=paul%20muldoon

It's this one: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html! It should be required reading for everyone I think.

"How to Write Articles and Essays Quickly and Expertly" by Stephen Downes: http://www.downes.ca/post/38526

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