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The new reading stack
A world beyond Amazon
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,940 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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Peter Naur's view of programming
To answer this question, let me take you a few years back, when I worked with a small high tech startup. We were working on a pretty complex augmented reality system spanning all layers from low-level computer vision components to cross-platform mobile and web apps. Especially for the lower-level components, a good…
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I Still Use RSS
Usable Security, Human-Computer Interaction & AI, from a UNIX perspective.
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My product is my garden
I’ve been part of the internet startup scene for a while. There are so many different camps: the bootstrappers, the VC-backed tech-bros, the crypto “investor...
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The world is full of wasted motion
The default state of the world is that things are inefficient, that 20% of the effort put in results in 80% of the output. This is a fundamental part of how I see the world, and this post outlines how I have internalised this idea, and how to pursue the clever hacks that can make things better
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Getting better at Linux with mini-projects
The first thing I wanted to learn more about was UNIX since Linux is a UNIX-like operating system. I also never really felt that I fully understood what exactly UNIX was, besides being a family of fairly similar operating systems.
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Know Your Amphetamines
In the 1950s, a shady outfit called Obetrol Pharmaceuticals made a popular over-the-counter diet pill called Obetrol...
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The Focus to Say No (2011)
To realize your potential you have to focus on the things that matter. You have to say no to good opportunities so you can pursue great ones.
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WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users
WhatsApp's rise and recent PR efforts highlight a class of business models that I call "user domestication".
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Once we can see them, it’s too late
[updates: here’s the paper, and here’s Robin’s brief response to some of the comments here] This month Robin Hanson, the famous and controversy-prone George Mason University econo…
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Why it’s usually crazier than you expect
I want to try to explain why Gamestop went up 100-fold in the last year and why Sears never recovered.
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How to increase your luck surface area (2010)
"Luck Surface Area" is a turn of phrase that popped out my mouth during a discussion episode of TechZing a few months back and is something I've been meaning to write about ever since but never got around to actually doing. However, thanks to Lance Jones who referenced the concept in a recent blog post I have finally…
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Baking with machine learning (2020)
Like many people, I’ve been entertaining myself at home by baking a ton. I’ve gotten pretty good at following recipes, but I decided I wanted to take things one step further and understand the science behind what differentiates a cake from a bread or a cookie. I also like machine learning so I thought: what if I could…
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Ontology of Psychiatric Conditions: Taxometrics
Is mental illness a thing? What kind of thing is it?
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Most of the time, you don’t really need another MOOC
Stop procrastinating, go off the happy path, learn just-in-time, and get your hands dirty.
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Crony Beliefs
[Note: if you prefer audio, you can listen to this essay narrated by Grognor on his excellent podcast Second Enumerations . —Ed. ]
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Greens: why we eat the leaves that we do (2013)
Jeanne reveals which branches of the evolutionary tree of plants bear edible leaves and speculates about why that is. Most of the 300,000 + plant species have leaves, and the function of all of the…
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Weak Men Are Superweapons (2014)
There was an argument on Tumblr which, like so many arguments on Tumblr, was terrible. I will rephrase it just a little to make a point.
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Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment
Windows 3.1 allowed you to change all system colors to your liking. Linux been fully themeable since the 90s. OSX came along with a draconian “all blue aqua, and maybe a hint of gray”.
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Study Reveals Immune Driver of Brain Aging
Scientists have identified a key factor in mental aging and shown that it might be prevented or reversed by fixing a glitch in the immune system's front-line soldiers.
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Still alive
You just keep on trying till you run out of cake
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90% of Everything Is Crap
I like Sturgeon’s law for a lot of reasons. But most of all, I like it as a nudge to try harder to like things.
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Software engineering is a learning process, working code is a side effect
I have come to the conclusion that Software Engineering is primarily a learning endeavour, the working code is rather a side effect. This quote is actually not mine but I am paraphrasing Alberto Brandolini who is making this very point in Event Storming (he was actually talking about Software Development, but I do not…
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My Second Brain – Zettelkasten
For as long as I have been learning web development () I have been taking notes. Partly notes to help clarify my understanding of something and partly for...
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