1411
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 7,740 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
1412
How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)
First we discussed the fact that technical issues cause remote meetings to suck. Then, we discussed how even when there are no technical issues, remote meetings still suck. They suck because they e…
1413
1414
Give people something to link to
If you have a project, an idea, a product feature, or anything else that you want other people to understand and have conversations about... give them something to link to! …
1415
Individualized Spaced Repetition in Hierarchical Knowledge Structures
Spaced repetition is complicated in hierarchical bodies of knowledge, like mathematics, because repetitions on advanced topics should trickle down to update the repetition schedules of simpler topics that are implicitly practiced (while being discounted appropriately since these repetitions are often too early to…
1416
The Birth of Standard Error (2013)
Earlier today Stephen Johnson, in a mailing list run by the The Unix Heritage Society , described the birth of the standard error concept: the idea that a program's error output is sent on a channel different from that of its normal output. Over the past forty years, all major operating systems and language libraries…
1417
1418
Three years in North Korea as a foreigner (2021)
Surviving 3 years in North Korea as a foreign diplomat was not easy. Living and working in the Hermit Kingdom was certainly the unique experience of a lifetime.
1419
Making my own wedding rings
I’m getting married pretty soon, and I figured it’d be fun to make my own rings. I’d seen a Nile Red video where he made purple gold, and the process seemed simple enough: Make a mold, pour some mol…
1420
1421
Do Skis Get Blunt?
Last winter, I rode a ski lift alongside a guy who claimed to be a retired Olympic ski tuner. Ski tuning, he said, was all a scam. If you keep your skis dry between days out they’ll stay sharp for their entire lifetime. Don’t get him started on waxing. His specific claim was that skis get blunt from corrosion, and all…
1422
How to think in writing
The thought behind the thought
1423
Anxious Generation – How Safetyism and Social Media Are Damaging the Kids
A review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, exploring how social media and overprotective parenting affect children’s mental health.
1424
Analyzing my electricity consumption
Electricity prices have been steadily rising in France for the past few years, with a particularly sharp increase since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This has led me to wonder about my own electricity consumption and how I could optimize it. The hardware Since 2015, the organization managing the…
1425
The Sphere
Las Vegas’ $2.3 billion immersive flagship takes a distressingly prophetic look inward.
1426
The case against morning yoga, daily routines, and endless meetings
How to maximize 10x work and avoid thoughtless daily 1x work routines
1427
Should this be a map or 500 maps?
500 priests, cartographic n00bism, and the limits of scale
1428
Getting the World Record in Hatetris (2022)
HATETRIS is the world's hardest version of Tetris; it's Tetris that hates you. In this post, we chronicle our eleven-month journey to get the world record, and some of our wrong turns along the way.
1429
Programmers should never trust anyone, not even themselves
Programmers should be paranoid.
1430
Four lines of code it was four lines of code
Four lines of code … it was four lines of code
1431
The economics of writing technical books
Yes, you can make money writing books. But never do it for that.
1432
How I overcame my addiction to sugar
Overcoming any addiction is hard. Sugar is very addictive and bad for your health. Here's my journey fighting with that addiction so far in case it can help anyone out there.
1433
Everything I Knew About Stretching Was Wrong
In the past 12 months my body’s mobility and flexibility went from abysmal, a source of persistent pain impacting my quality of life, to pretty darn good. I’m not about to become a stretching influencer, but after a year of researching, trial and error, and hard work I feel back on track and like I... Continue reading…
1434
1435
Notes on Tajikistan
Over the summer, I spent about two weeks in Tajikistan, mostly in Dushanbe (the capital) and various points along the Pamir Highway, which borders Afghanistan and later leads into Kyrgyzstan. This …
1436
Nobody knows what's going on
A major online publication once reported in a profile on me that I had retired at 33. A few old friends and acquaintances reached out to congratulate me on my financial ind...
1437
There's more to mathematics than rigour and proofs (2007)
The history of every major galactic civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Wh…
1438
The Programmer's Brain (2021)
by Felienne Hermans
1439
Don't store your cucumbers in the fridge (2012)
Image courtesy of UC Davis. Photographer: Don EdwardsJust in time for cucumber season, some news that surprises me. Did you know that you should store cucumbers at room temperature?Credit for my enlightenment goes to UC Davis.
1440
I learned Haskell in just 15 years
Haskell is a programming language invented sometime in the 20th century by Scottish logicians as a prank. ¹ Fifteen years or so ago, for reasons I can no longer remotely recall, I started learning Haskell. Now, I have finally written a useful program in Haskell, and I am pretty sure I can do it again, if I ever need…