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Asterisk
Challenged to write about a single Unicode character, I chose the humble asterisk. In this post, Julia takes a back seat but it’s working hard behind the scenes. [1] The font used for the examples is JuliaMono.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 7,743 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
This post has been a long time in coming. I stopped reading HN over a month ago, so I’ve had some time to cool off. I’ve been struggling to put my thoughts into words, and so this pos…
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Teaching our five year old to code by cheating
Teaching our five year old daughter to code by cheating.
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Why Life Can’t Be Simpler
We’d all like life to be simpler. But we also don’t want to sacrifice our options and capabilities. Tesler’s law of the conservation of complexity, a rule from design, explains why we can’t have both. Here’s how the law can help us create better products and services by rethinking simplicity.
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I built a lay-down desk
After spending part of the last 12 months travelling in Europe I'm now settling down around Paris and I need to adapt my multi-screens setup. You probably have seen an ads for the altwork desk a $7000 desk that let you work laying down. Spending a big part of my …
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On the destruction of America’s best high school
[C]hildren with special abilities and skills need to be nourished and encouraged. They are a national treasure. Challenging programs for the “gifted” are sometimes decried as “eli…
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Why I left my tenured academic job
The news is out : I left France, I'm no longer a professor at EURECOM, I joined the Malware Research Team at CISCO Talos, and I moved to beautiful Vienna. Big change :-)
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Color blindness
Color blindness is an inaccurate term. Most color-blind people can see color, they just don't see the same colors as everyone else. There ha...
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Enjoy the Best, Not the Latest, Media
Tried and tested beats new and marketed
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Writing a book: is it worth it?
My book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications , recently passed the milestone of 100,000 copies sold. Last year, it was the second-best-selling book in O’Reilly’s entire catalogue, second only to Aurélien Géron’s machine learning book . Machine learning is obviously a hot topic, so I am quite content with coming…
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I used the internet to painlessly relearn a foreign language
Things are totally different than when I first learnt Spanish back in 2003.
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Tips for immersive video calls
I spent way too long figuring out the how to make video calls feel natural. Here’s the best advice I came up with.
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Won’t Subscribe
Since I’m lightly employed these days, I enjoy keeping up with the news. In recent weeks, I’ve been blocked by the paywalls of the Wall Street Journal , Globe & Mail (closest thing Canada has to a national newspaper), the Times/Sunday Times (of London), the Telegraph (also UK), Business Insider , and Bloomberg …
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Randomized Living
Max Hawkins is nomadic artist and software engineer.
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PG and Jessica
A lot of people want to replicate YC in some other industry or some other place or with some other strategy. In general, people seem to assume that: 1) although there was some degree of mystery or...
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People expect technology to suck because it sucks
I get at least 27 tech annoyances on a single day
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You're enlightened – now what?
Suppose you are enlightened.
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Mars Problems vs. Venus Problems
Posted on Wednesday 23 Sep 2020. 825 words, 7 links. By Matt Webb.
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Time spent programming is often time well spent
I concur so strongly not only because he writes about RSS, which I'm on record as supporting and using. I enjoy rolling my own simple software in almost any domain. Simple has a lot of advantages. Under my control has a lot of advantages. But the biggest advantage echoes what Dr. Drang says: Programming is often more…
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Frugality Is Non-Linear (2019)
Most people have a mental model of budgeting which is roughly linear. If you spend half as much money, your money will last twice as long. As you approach zero spending, your runway goes up to infinity.
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How to Drive on Sand Without Getting Stuck (2017)
Tips and techniques for driving in sandy conditions. Must read before hitting the beach or dunes in your vehicle to avoid getting stuck because it is very easy to get stuck in sand. Avoid joining the 'digging club'!
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On the Use of a Life
First, to dispense with the philosophical argument: Yes, this is my life, and yes, I'm free to use — or waste — it however I please; but I don't think there's anything wrong with asking if this is how my time could be best spent. That applies doubly if the question is not merely about the choices I made but is rather…
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Why aren’t you more serious?
Feedback about random posts and sporadic seriousness.
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All the jobs I failed to get
A few years ago, Johannes Haushofer published a CV of failures. In it, he lists all the grants he wasn't awarded, positions he didn't get, papers rejected. I think that people need to be more open about failure. None of us are perfect - despite what our social media presence says - and all of us suffer rejection. But…
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Ice
Most climate scientists believe that the melting of the ice sheets will be gradual and linear, but are they right?
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On Browser Tabs
It's always surprised me how little I hear about browsers.