3121
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 7,742 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
3122
3123
Forget Twitter Threads; Write a Blog Post Instead
All of the kool kids in Twitter land seem to be jumping on the bandwagon of a very annoying craze. Twitter threads. Please stop; write a blog post instead
3124
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 behavior to avoid seeming stupid, which results in people thinking that I'm stupid. Although there are some downsides to people thinking that I'm stupid…
3125
Overly analytical guide to escorting
The Overly Analytical Guide to Escorting
3126
A Meta-Scientific Perspective on Thinking: Fast and Slow (2020)
2011 was an important year in the history of psychology, especially social psychology. First, it became apparent that one social psychologist had faked results for dozens of publications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel). Second, a highly respected journal published an article with the incredible claim…
3127
What to Learn
It's common to see people advocate for learning skills that they have or using processes that they use. For example, Steve Yegge has a set of blog posts where he recommends reading compiler books and learning about compilers. His reasoning is basically that, if you understand compilers, you'll see compiler problems…
3128
Gell-Mann Amnesia
Michael Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann Amnesia effect to describe forgetting how unreliable a source is in one area when you trust it in another area.
3129
On Receiving my Certificate of Loss of Nationality
Five months after my renunciation day, I received my Certificate of Loss of Nationality today. People keep asking me how that feels...
3130
Always Do Extra
A simple rule that every good, veteran programmer seems to follow with respect to managing their time.
3131
And you will know us by the company we keep
It feels as if we're at the tail end of the first era of social media in the West. Looking back at the companies that have survived, certain application architectural choices are ubiquitous. By now, we're all familiar with the infinite vertical scrolling feed of content units, the likes, the follows, the comments, the…
3132
My first industry job: lies, deceptions, and layoffs
My first job was both a blessing and a nightmare. It taught me more about the world than about software development, but those lessons were invaluable.
3133
Worst Case
Suppose you’re running your organization’s crucial apps in the cloud. Specifically, suppose you’re running them them on AWS, and in particular in the “us-east-1” region? Could us-east-1 go away? What might you do about it? Let’s catastrophize!
3134
Sending Emails to Myself
In April, I wrote operatornotify.py , a module which allows my programs to notify me of important information or errors. I was immediately very proud of it. It felt awesome to get so much impact out of a sub-100 line module as I went around hooking it up to my existing programs and getting the tracebacks from my…
3135
Explaining explaining: a quick guide on explanatory writing
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
3136
Thoughts on chess improvement, after gaining 600 points in 6 months
I played chess briefly with my friends in high school, where I had a rating of around 1100 online. I gave up the game for about 10 years, then picked it back up again recently, in May. I’ve tried a ton of different approaches in the past 6 months, switching things up whenever I stopped seeing results. I’ve improved…
3137
Curiosity Is Better Than Being Smart?
Are you smart? Are you curious? Which one is better? Well, in this post, you will see why curiosity is better than being smart.
3138
Why obsessively following successful people online is dangerous
Convincing yourself that following more famous people online will lead to a better life is dangerous. You're simply wasting your time.
3139
The big alcohol study that didn't happen
Why did a huge alcohol RCT get cancelled? A strange story of science, academia, bureaucratic maneuvering, ambition, politics, capitalism, the deep state, secret emails, and slippery ethical slopes.
3140
John Carpenter’s “Planaria”: Or, the New Individualism
It happened for me back in the eighties, when I encountered the definition of “Life” in Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker : “Information, shaped by natural selection”. That concise distillation—an actual description of what life is , as opposed to all those tired and exception-prone checklists that only talk about what…
3141
3142
Things Unlearned
One of my favorite questions to ask people is: what are some things that you used to strongly believe but have now changed your mind about?
3143
The code worked differently when the moon was full
I love a good bug, especially ones that are initially hard to explain but then ...
3144
Revenge Bedtime Procrastination
This is the Sunday edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.
3145
I bricked then recovered my reMarkable 2
Let me start by saying that the reMarkable 2 is a great device. I’ve wanted something like this for a long time: a relatively open device that runs Linux with an eInk screen and the ability to write on that screen with a pen. The reMarkable 2 delivers: I can ssh into it, and there’s a whole bunch of people writing…
3146
On Solitude
Over 15 years ago, I took my first device-free, silent, solitude experience.
3147
3148
3149
Building a Theban Lattice Stool
If coming from Google: Click here to refresh this page, bringing all the related posts together. I found this ancient Egyptian stool on the British Museum’s website in early 2020 and fell in …
3150
I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto
This isn’t the first time I’ve received an e-mail like this: Hey! I’ve done my research and looked at a lot of facts and old forgotten archives. I know that you are Satoshi, I do not want to tell anyone about this. I just wanted to say that you created weapons of mass destruction where niches remained poor and the…