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Always Do Extra
A simple rule that every good, veteran programmer seems to follow with respect to managing their time.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,939 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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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…
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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.
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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!
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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…
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Multitasking Doesn't Work
When we think we’re multitasking, most often we aren’t really doing two things at once, but instead, individual actions in rapid succession.
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Explaining explaining: a quick guide on explanatory writing
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
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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…
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Intermittent fasting in mice improves long-term memory retention
Intermittent Fasting is an effective means of improving long term memory retention and generating new adult hippocampal neurons in mice
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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?
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The code worked differently when the moon was full
I love a good bug, especially ones that are initially hard to explain but then ...
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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.
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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…
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On Solitude
Over 15 years ago, I took my first device-free, silent, solitude experience.
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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 …
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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…
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The Curious Case of IKEA Vocabulary
Part of what makes IKEA unique is their product names. Each name means something, often in a funny or ambigious way. When IKEA went international, they decided to use the same Swedish names everywhere. This makes sense from an organizational sanity standpoint, but it deprives most of the world of this particular joy.
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Quitting your dream job twice
Quitting is never easy. Building things can be. I'm leaving TTFM Labs to start a company.
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Reasons to Quit Social Media
You either use social media, or you're used by these insidious platforms. Here are 20 reasons to quit social media.
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