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James Somers is a writer and programmer based in New York.
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收藏The paper computer
Now that we have actually good AI, I have this vision of a form of computing that doesn’t involve me using a computer so much. Imagine you had the day’s emails to go through. It would be nice if the o...
Vivarium: The keeper of a lab's animals stumbles onto a secret [fiction]
I thought the HN crowd would appreciate this story I wrote about the keeper of a university's lab animals. In reporting articles about science, and being a biology-watcher generally, I’ve had an uneas...
DocWriter: Typewriter that sends real-time keystrokes to Google Doc
For years I’ve wanted a writing machine that would combine the best parts of a typewriter and a word processor. After months of tinkering, my friend Ben Gross and I just finished building one. We call...
Gettiers in software engineering (2019)
In 1963, the philosopher Edmund Gettier published a three-page paper in the journal Analysis that quickly became a classic in the field. Epistemologists going back to the Greeks had debated what it me...
Introducing Five’Em, a Texas Hold’Em variant
The game of Five'Em was invented by two friends of mine, Ben Gross and Rich Berger, to combat Hold'Em fatigue. The rules are simple: You're dealt five hole cards instead of two, and after each round o...
Most book clubs are doing it wrong
The standard way to run a book club is to have everybody finish the book before meeting to talk about it. You have one meeting per book. The discussion goes on for one or two hours before it runs out ...
Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems
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...
How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document’s keystrokes
If you’ve ever typed anything into a Google Doc, you can now play it back as if it were a movie — like traveling through time to look over your own shoulder as you write. This is possible because ever...
A Defense of Philosophy (Against Paul Graham)
1. PG's project In How to Do Philosophy, Paul Graham claims that "judging from their works, most philosophers up to the present have been wasting their time." His point is that philosophy per se is st... 
Intelligence and the World
Alva Noe, a philosopher of mind, talks over at about the problem of consciousness. He argues that the old "input-output" model—where "perception is input from the world to the mind, action is output f...
How to Write Readable E-mails
Strunk & White. Write crisply, punctuate, and capitalize. Don't make mistakes. Cover one topic per e-mail. If you have lots to say, break it up. Use the subject line to articulate your main idea, ques...
Leaving the Bikeshed
There's a lot of contrarianism in college, and I think it's because agreeing seems lazy. When you don't challenge something, one's liable to think you haven't thought it through. After all, scholarshi...
The Ro-ad Phenomenon
There is a scene in Black Sheep where David Spade becomes fascinated by the simple word "roads." (giggling) Roads! Ro-ads. Ro-ods. We could write it off as the consequence of nitrous oxide exposure (h...
Douglas Hofstadter's Innumeracy Exercises
The following fun exercises appeared on p. 134 of Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas, a collection of his Scientific American articles from the early 1980s (the title is a play on Martin Gardner's column...
Tracking Tiger Woods (Using Python)
As much as I enjoy it, I can't always spend an afternoon watching the Masters. So I've rolled a little Python script to keep track of the leaderboard: anytime Tiger Woods moves relative to par, I get ...
Overactive Structure Sets
I think of my brain1 as hosting a zoo of deeply nested structures that clump together in response to action in the world. When I encounter something new, whatever is in charge works quickly to find an...
Ulysses Haikus
I have discovered a very simple algorithm for generating passable English poetry: grab random sentences from the greatest novel ever written and plug them into the most primitive template you can find...
Inconceivable Things
Let's say you just got a job as Enumerator at a company that sells integers, and not more than an hour into your first day the vice president of Evens (Mr. Parity) tells you "We need something complet...
Wall Street Stole My Smart Friends
Investment banks are machines for turning undergraduates into money. They're a talent vortex, a recruiting machine so well adapted that an entire school system has sprung up to feed it. Banks take adv...
Being Productive
A common narrative these days says we're inundated with data, communicating in increasingly compact forms and living our lives at an ever more frantic pace. Raw bits hop across the network in millisec...
Before the Water Freezes
I want to write about the net effect of making something clear. To start I might mention the writing process itself, and talk about how a blank page simultaneously reflects the mind's uncertain, analo...