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Mental Model Fallacy (2018)
The mental model fallacy is that it’s worth it to read descriptions of mental models, written and aggregated by non-practitioners, in the pursuit of self-improvement and success. It isn't.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 615 posts.
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The Amish health care system
I. Amish people spend only a fifth as much as you do on health care, and their health is fine. What can we learn from them? A reminder: the Amish are a German religious sect who immigrated to colon…
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A theory of Zoom fatigue
The Convivial Society: Dispatch No. 5
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Gresham’s Law: Bad Drives Out Good as Time Passes (2009)
Gresham's Law is an economic principle that sates "the bad drives out the good" as time passes. The concept has many broad and far reaching consequences.
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Building a PC, Part IX: Downsizing
Hard to believe that I’ve had the same PC case since 2011, and my last serious upgrade was in 2015. I guess that’s yet another sign that the PC is over, because PC upgrades have gotten really boring. It took 5 years for me to muster up the
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Covid-19’s impact on Tor
Tor, like much of the world, has been caught up in the COVID-19 crisis. Like many other nonprofits and small businesses, the crisis has hit us hard, and we have had to make some difficult decisions. We had to let go of 13 great people who helped make Tor available to millions of people around the world. We will move…
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Working from home on the //c+
In honor of Apple's 44th birthday today, I decided to set up my //c+ as a terminal using my homebuilt wifi modem. Getting modem.mgr...
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A Failure, but Not of Prediction
I. Vox asks What Went Wrong With The Media’s Coronavirus Coverage? They conclude that the media needs to be better at “not just saying what we do know, but what we don’t know”. This rai…
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Organizing a Group Buy of Flour
We just had a huge shift from people eating out to eating in, and now a lot more people are baking, so we and a lot of people I know have had trouble finding grocery stores with flour in stock. The residential supply chain is struggling to keep up with demand. On the other hand, the commercial supply chain is…
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Your statement is correct but misses the point
Let's assume that there is a discussion going on on the Internet about programming languages. One of the design points that come up is a gar...
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Sleeve cap ease is bogus (2005)
I have no illusions; I know that today’s post will upset quite a few people. Why, might you ask? Well, it’s because there has been a long standing myth -myth- in construction that the p…
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Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies
Let structure emerge organically. When it’s imposed from the start, you prematurely constrain what may emerge and artificially compress the nuanced relationships between ideas.
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Life Is Made of Unfair Coin Flips
It’s time we did a non-pandemic related newsletter issue. So this week we’ll do something more fun. Today we’re going to talk about an interesting journal article that came out two weeks ago,…
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Analyzing HN readers' personal blogs
Analyzing the little guys
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Writer: An Open Digital Typewriter (2018)
TL;DR: A digital typewriter based on a Raspberry Pi and an E-Ink screen. The code/build instructions are available on GitHub .
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Hours
A novelist friend introduced me to a productivity technique I’ve found effective. I spread it to my friends, and now to my horror management types have discovered it. A friend just told me he…
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A new form of brain stimulation relieved severe depression in a small study
Stanford Medicine researchers used high doses of magnetic stimulation, delivered on an accelerated timeline and targeted to individual neurocircuitry, to treat patients with severe depression.
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What concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? Kayfabe (2011)
The sophisticated "scientific concept" with the greatest potential to enhance human understanding may be argued to come not from the halls of academe, but rather from the unlikely research environment of professional wrestling.
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Something small, every day (2013)
It takes time to do anything worthwhile, but thankfully, we don’t need it all in one chunk. So this year, forget about the year as a whole. Forget about months and forget about weeks.
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How I lost control of our bank accounts to a phone scammer
Yesterday, instead of having a productive afternoon at home, I had the privilege of sitting at the bank for a couple of hours, resolving a problem completely of my own doing: I fell for a phone scammer. My wife and I had to close our accounts—which were in excess of 25 years old—and set up new ones. I then spent hours…
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What's a virus, anyway? The bare-bones basics
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, viruses are getting a lot of attention; here's an inside look into the most abundant life form on Earth.
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Lead-Free Solder Is Better for You
I spent the morning reading material Safety Data Sheets, because someone on the internet was wrong!