1801
I should have loved biology
In biology class, biology wasn't presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,821 posts.
1802
Einstein-Bohr debate settled once and for all
In Steven Pinker’s guest post from last week, there’s one bit to which I never replied. Steve wrote: After all, in many areas Einstein was no Einstein. You [Scott] above all could speak…
1803
Go generics are not bad
When programming, we often need to write 'generic' functions where the exact data type is not important. For example, you might want to write a simple function that sums up numbers. Go lacked this notion until recently, but it was recently added (as of version 1.18). So I took it out for a spin. In … Continue reading…
1804
Linux Sucks 2022
"This time it's personal."
1805
1806
Books That Changed How I Hear Music
But none of them are music books
1807
1808
Shader-like holographic effects with CSS
Get a shiny WebGL look without actually using WebGL. In this article we take a look at how CSS blend modes unleash the potential of cool compositing effects without the need for JavaScript
1809
1810
Problems at Roblox
Problems at Roblox (RBLX)
1811
Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
Explaining Ethereum's consensus mechanism after The Merge
1812
Body Margin 8px
All browsers add an 8px margin on the body element – it’s part of the w3c-recommended default stylesheet which browsers generally use as a starting point for their own ‘user agent’ styles. But why 8px ? Where does that come from?
1813
LeCun's 2022 paper on autonomous machine intelligence does not cite prior work
1990: gradient descent learns subgoals. 1991: multiple time scales and levels of abstraction. 1997: world models learn predictable abstract representations...
1814
DRY is an over-rated programming principle?
I figured I'd kick off my new blog with the most click baity thing I could think of. I suspect any developer reading this is aware of the DRY principle becau...
1815
Life Stats
Find out what's happened in your lifetime.
1816
Alain de Botton on existential maturity and what emotional intelligence means
“The emotionally intelligent person knows that they will only ever be mentally healthy in a few areas and at certain moments, but is committed to fathoming their inadequacies and warning othe…
1817
1818
Where to wait for an elevator (2010)
Where do you stand in order to minimize the expected distance to walk to catch the first elevator that arrives? Maybe not where you think.
1819
Flânerie: The Art of Aimless Strolling
Strolling aimlessly – instead of having set routes and set sites to see – is something I’ve always enjoyed doing, especially in big or new cities. I discovered that there was a French term for this aimless wandering, considered to be a kind of art. And that’s flânerie, while the person who engages in this…
1820
Seriously bright light vs. winter blahs
Most SAD light therapy lamps are not bright enough. How to get brighter light than any you can buy!
1821
Emacs’s Builtin Elisp Cheat Sheet
Emacs now has a builtin cheat sheet for a large swathe of common elisp functions. If you can't remember exactly how to do something, then this is a great place to look for it first.
1822
It’s 1997 and you want to build a website
You have a few options. How much time you got?
1823
Did the early medieval era ever take place?
On the “phantom time hypothesis”, the bizarre conspiracy theory that 297 years of European history were entirely made up.
1824
I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
1825
Why Can't Database Tables Index Themselves? (2006)
Here’s a thought question for today: why can’t database tables index themselves? Obviously, indexes are a central concept to databases and database performance. But horror tales still abound of naïve developers who “forget” to index their tables, and encounter massive performance and scalability problems down the road…
1826
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1828
Selfhosting on Localhost
As a software engineer with a bit of job-induced paranoia, I love the idea of escaping the claws of big tech via self-hosting. In recent years, a plethora of amazing free and open source projects have emerged, providing alternatives to everything from Dropbox and iTunes to Android Home. However, I don’t want to manage…
1829
What comes after Git
Git was born from the collaboration problems in the Linux kernel. Nearly a decade later, new problems arose when Kubernetes (the operating system of the cloud) brought open-source collaboration to a new level.
1830
My Preferred Smart Home Vendors
A non-exhaustive list of smart home devices that work well with Home Assistant