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I heat my home by mining crypto currencies
Personal Blog of Christian Haschek
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,940 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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A Retrospective Look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard
Yes, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is as good as I remembered.
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Lena
A note from the author You can now buy this story as part of my collection, Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories. This collection also includes a sequel story, titled "Driver". This article is about the standard test brain image. For the original human, see Mi...
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Commenting vs. Making
issue no. 0011
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Find the Hard Work You're Willing to Do (2018)
I like this passage from John Urschel Goes Pro , about the former NFL player who is pursuing a Ph.D. in math:
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We live in an age of distractions, dealing with constant mental stimulus
Yet another calm weekend after months of lockdowns and I sit down to enjoy a book. After turning a couple of pages, I'm no longer able to keep going. In-between, I've managed to look at my phone four times and I've had my thoughts wander away. Why does something so simple feel suddenly so difficult?
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How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
There’s a scene in Moneyball in which Brad Pitt’s character, the manager of the Oakland A’s , is watching a recording of one of his players trying so hard to run fast that he stumbles and falls. Lying on the ground he’s angry at himself, because he doesn’t realize that right before he started his run he hit a home run…
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I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)
A note from the author This is an older version of this story, from 2007. Here's the latest version, from 2022. Tim already had his bag and overcoat on and his keys in his hand and was about to leave when Diane stopped him at the door. "I just got this thing working....
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My Life in E-Ink
Collection of odds and ends relating to e-readers including personal reminisces Background # Reading has been a huge part of my life. The written word has had arguably more of an impact on my life than anything I have experienced in person. As a kid back in early 2000’s; this meant a lot of library trips and saving…
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“I will slaughter you”
You might know that I've posted funny emails I've received on my blog several times in the past. The kind of emails people send me when they experience problems with some device they own (like a car) and they contact me because my email address happens to be visible somewhere. People sometimes say I should … Continue…
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How to be more productive without forcing yourself
Imagine you could work more and be wildly productive. And you wouldn’t need to force yourself to work.
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Critical Thinking Isn't Just a Process
Authoritarian muscle memory and the twists and turns of lying
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Kill the Alarm Clock (2017)
Few upwardly mobile people in the modern rat-race society can live without an alarm clock. With a shot of strong coffee and round-the-clock stress, most people learn to live and survive with an alarm clock. Half of the population wakes up with an alarm, 9% are woken by a partner, 4% by pets, 3% by children, etc. That…
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Learning Ruby: Things I Like, Things I Miss from Python
Thoughts on Ruby from the point of view of a Pythonista, brought to you by Workpath, the strategy execution platform.
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Typing Is Hard
Type checking is the process of taking a given program in some programming language and working out whether all variables and expressions have the correct types, i.e. strings are assigned to strings, arithmetic expressions involve only numbers, etc. Some languages also offer type inference , tasking the compiler with…
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I Really Blew It (2020)
I recently realized that I have been wasting my time on a dumb effort for the last 35 years. It all started back in 1983. My game for the Atari, Eastern Front (1941), had been a big hit, and Dale Yocum of the Atari Program Exchange suggested that I release the source code for it. This was an exciting idea, as nobody…
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In defense of interesting writing on controversial topics
Some thoughts on the New York Times' Slate Star Codex profile
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Do Adults Really Not Remember School Sucked?
One of the constant refrains which has bemused me during the pandemic is all the people saying how much kids want to go back to school.
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Switching to Windows
Around 2015, I started to realize that I was no longer part of Apple's target audience. I've since found that Windows, and the devices available on the Windows side, from gaming laptops to convertibles to custom-built PCs, are just a better match for my requirements.
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Mouse studies show gene therapy can cause big drop in latent herpes infections
Improved gene therapy techniques cleared up to 95 percent of latent herpes virus in mice. Human trials? At least 3 years away. Fred Hutch virologist Dr. Keith Jerome hopes this study "opens up the idea that we can start thinking about cure, rather than just control of the virus."
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Foldable Words
Packing up the household for a recent move, I was delving into shoeboxes, photo albums, and file folders that had not been opened in decades. One of my discoveries, found in an envelope at the back of a file drawer, was the paper sleeve from a drinking straw, imprinted with a saccharine message:
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Timezone Bullshit
People often use short timezone abbreviations like EST and PST to refer to timezones. If you're doing this in a computer program, you are almost certainly making a huge mistake. Let's take take a look, using the disastrously bad unix libc timezone tools , which you're almost certainly using under the hood if you're…
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Talent Is Largely a Myth
One of the repeating motifs of recruiting in the software industry are mantras of “talent”: “We recruit the best talent”, “talent attracts talent”, “we value talent” and so on. Some companies have so called “head of talent”, “talent acquisition”, “talent development” professionals on their payroll - basically a…
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What data on myself I collect and why (2020)
How I am using 50+ sources of my personal data
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WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise
What does running a medical database teach you about why everything sucks?
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Notes on My Chemotherapy
Chemotherapy after colon cancer at age 34