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Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)
The struggle for distinction
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 7,741 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
1772
Carl Sagan's Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking
Necessary cognitive fortification against propaganda, pseudoscience, and general falsehood.
1773
Getting my library cards onto my phone the hard way
Our local libraries, The Seattle Public Library and the King County Library System, issue pieces of plastic with barcodes printed on the back assigned to your borrower account. These cards are not strictly necessary in 2023; most everything at Seattle libraries is self-service, including circulation, and these…
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The fun factor of the video game Uplink
A blog where an obscure indie dev dumps his thoughts sometimes.
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The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy
Why I've gotten more and more pessimistic about my relationship with Twitter.
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Notes on making a multiplayer "doing nothing app"
Projects, experiments and toys by Rafał Pastuszak
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My Left Kidney
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Takkyu-bin: Luggage forwarding in Japan
Please don't roll your big bags around town
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Why every microwave sucks these days
if you're lucky, you haven't. you're still using a microwave from the 1990's or something like that, and it still works just fine. after all, how can a microwave be made any better? you put stuff in, and the water in the stuff heats up. there really isn't much innovation to be done that wasn't already done half a…
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Advice to a novice programmer
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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On not noticing rather too many things
Last year I was on a date, and, being somewhat new to San Francisco, proposed a walk directly through the Tenderloin. After we arrived, my date was somewhat disturbed: “What happened?” I said. “Di…
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The white furnace test
What;s up with those empty renders in rendering research papers? The white furnace test, one of my favourite rendering debug tools. It can be used to check several levels of implementation, not just the BRDF, but also the sampling and the Monte Carlo integration loop, Continue reading →
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Please be dying, but not too quickly, part 2: The patient's perspective
The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing: from investigator calls to taking back (almost) all the bad things I've ever said about New Jersey
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In search of the least viewed article on Wikipedia (2022)
Wikipedia sure is popular. The most popular articles in a given week routinely get millions of views. But with 6 million plus articles, Wikipedia has plenty ...
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Please Pay for a Year of Nothing
This morning, two emails came in from Apple. The first was about the upcoming renewal of my yearly subscription to Disney+ and the second email was about the price increase of my Disney+ subscription from $79.99 to $109.99. It took me all of 10 seconds to think about it, but I canceled my subscription. It’s not really…
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"A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" Simulated by GPT-4
A short simulation of Neal Stephenson's Illustrated Primer using GPT-4 and DALL·E 3.
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Love after life: Richard Feynman's letter to his departed wife (2017)
Where the hard edge of physics meets the vulnerable metaphysics of the human heart.
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Write more "useless" software
After my last blog post about Hurl, someone asked me, and I quote: "... why?" The simple answer is "for the joke." But the longer answer is that useless software [1] is a fantastic way to explore and experience the joy of computing. Play is an important part of exploration and joy.
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Mindblowing dissertations
We don’t generally see PhD dissertations as an exciting genre to read, and that is wholly our loss. As the…
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The Beatles’ collaborative notes: Three ways to write a song
"Just say whatever comes into your head each time..."
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What I wish I knew when I got my ASN
A thorough walkthrough and explanation of the process of getting an ASN, which I wish I knew when I got mine. Hopefully this will prevent readers from headaches and getting scammed.
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Personalized learning can feel isolating. Whole class learning can feel personal
Personalized learning can feel isolating. Whole class learning can feel personal. This is hard to understand.
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The midwit home
Less automation and less agony
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Impacts of lack of sleep
Sleep is important. People vastly underestimate the extent to which not sleeping is harmful, viewing it as a valid trade off for productivity and overlooking all of the longterm negative effects.