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Inflation, part 1: On shelter futures
A deep-dive
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 411 posts.
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Inflation is differential and restructuring (2021)
When it comes to inflation, economists get it wrong. Inflation is always and everywhere differential.
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Literate programming: Knuth is doing it wrong (2014)
Literate programming advocates this: Order your code for others to read, not for the compiler. Beautifully typeset your code so one can curl up in bed to read it like a novel. Keep documentation in sync with code. What's not to like about this vision? I have two beefs with it: the ends are insufficiently ambitious by…
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Burnout
What do we actually know about burnout? What does the research say? Is burnout preventable? All the research, in one free, updated place.
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Computers as I used to love them
File synchronization can be fun and painless if you don’t have to deal with corporate bullshit.
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Mastodon.technology Shutdown
Dear mastodon.technology community,
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An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation
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The Cult Inside Google
I worked for Google for about three and a half years as a video producer. I was fired because I raised alarm about a doomsday cult that…
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Unlearning perfectionism
A way out from the perfectionism trap
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Lab Leak 2.0?
“If a $1000 PhD side project could kill millions of people, we must end viral [gain-of-function research], or it may end us.”
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Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming
When you use Rust, it is sometimes outright preposterous how much knowledge of language, and how much of programming ingenuity and curiosity you need in order to accomplish the most trivial things. When you feel particularly desperate, you go to rust/issues and search for a solution for your problem. Suddenly, you…
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Shortest URLs on the Internet
What’s the shortest URL for which content is served on the internet? There are quite a few single-letter second-level domains that are used in very short URLs, such as Google’s http://g.co or Facebook’s https://m.me. But we can go shorter than this: there’s nothing stopping TLD registry operators serving A records at…
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I got a computer science degree in 3 months for less than $5000 (2020)
Software developer based in Montréal, Canada
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Xilem: An Architecture for UI in Rust
Rust is an appealing language for building user interfaces for a variety of reasons, especially the promise of delivering both performance and safety. However, finding a good architecture is challenging. Architectures that work well in other languages generally don’t adapt well to Rust, mostly because they rely on…
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Exploring 12M of the 2.3B images used to train Stable Diffusion
What images were used to train Stable Diffusion's text-to-image AI model? I worked with Simon Willison to make a data browser to explore and search a sample of 12 million images.
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Why is Booz Allen renting us back our own national parks?
In 2017, consulting giant Booz Allen cut a deal with the government to extract junk fees from Americans who want to use Federal lands and waters for hunting or fishing. Will Congress or Biden act?
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Keyboard shortcuts for GNU Readline
Most command line programs that offer line editing -- like bash, Python, GDB, psql, sqlite and more -- do so using GNU readline. Readline's a powerful library that grants history, completion, movement and editing to programs that use it --- and a stable and consistent set of keyboard shortcuts. Shame, then, that even…
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Workplace surveillance is coming for you
If you want to do something terrible with technology, you can't just roll it out on people with money and social capital. They'll complain and your idea will tank. Successful shitty tech rollouts start with people you can abuse with impunity (prisoners, kids, migrants, etc) and then work their way up the privilege…
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Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil (2011)
(This is another of my speculative pieces and nothing to do with Star Wars. This one is for an older trilogy.) Old Tom Bombadil. Possibly the least liked character in The Lord of the Rings. A childish figure so disliked by fans of the book that few object to his absence from all adaptations of the…
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We will never have enough software developers (2020)
Developers are dropping out of the profession in large numbers despite efforts to grow the number of computer science graduates and software engineers.
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You're Not Losing Fat Because You're Eating Too Damn Much (2016)
The environmental and cognitive factors at play that have people eating more without realising.
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The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option
In this installment: some strange things I discovered when purchasing a FreeDOS laptop from Hewlett Packard. I suspect that the audience for this will be somewhat limited but I had fun exploring this. Perhaps you, dear reader, will find a chuckle in here too.
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Roguelike Tutorial in Rust (2019)
This tutorial is free and open source, and all code uses the MIT license - so you are free to do with it as you like. My hope is that you will enjoy the tutorial, and make great games!
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Psychic Signatures in Java
The long-running BBC sci-fi show Doctor Who has a recurring plot device where the Doctor manages to get out of trouble by showing an identity card which is actually completely blank. Of course, thi…
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Missouri governor’s office responsible for teacher data leak
Missouri Governor Mike Parson made headlines last year when he vowed to criminally prosecute a journalist for reporting a security flaw in a state website that exposed personal information of more than 100,000 teachers. But Missouri prosecutors now say they will not pursue charges following revelations that the data…