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How to explain infinity to kids
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,940 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
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Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro
Robert — In the early to mid-90s my hobby was making video games of various sorts with my friend Jesse. Our tools were Recreational Software Designs Game-Maker 2.0 and your creation JASC Paint Shop…
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How to read an RFC
For better or worse, Requests for Comments (RFCs) are how we specify many protocols on the Internet. These documents are alternatively treated as holy texts by developers who parse them for hidden meanings, then shunned as irrelevant because they can’t be understood. This often leads to frustration and – more…
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Why I Ripped the Same CD 300 Times
I collect music by buying physical CDs, digitizing them with Exact Audio Copy , and scanning the artwork. This is sometimes challenging if the CD was self-published in a limited run in a foreign country ten years ago. It is very challenging if the CDs have an innate defect that renders some tracks unreadable.
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How to read Plato (1995)
This page is part of the "e-mail archives" section of a site, Plato and his dialogues , dedicated to developing a new interpretation of Plato's dialogues. The "e-mail archives" section includes HTML edited versions of posts that I submitted on various e-mail discussion lists about Plato and ancient philosophy. Note: I…
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Administrative Purgatory
your case is still going through administrative processing and we don't know when that process will be completed. Last year I was denied to go to the US when I was about to travel to San Francisco. Me and my employer's legal team never got answers as to why this happened so I've personally tried … Continue reading…
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An ingenious vintage German cycle map (2014)
We cycled the Swiss part of the Rhine Cycleway last week, with our folding bikes neatly stowed in suitcases for the flight. A combination of cycle.travel (natch), the Cicerone guide, and the excellent MapOut app guided us safely along the way: a very modern combination of mapping styles.
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The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher (1991)
Before reading, please set your irony detector to the on position. If you find yourself inclined to dismiss the below as paranoid, you should know that the design behind the current American school system is very well-documented historically, in published writings of dizzying cynicism by such well-known figures as…
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YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List
A post about summer reading [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17513576] on Hacker News inspired us to put a list together for 2018. Here’s what we’ve been reading. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Years of Lyndon Johnson…
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Whole House Fan and Evaporative Cooler
In dry climates it's common for people to use evaporative ("swamp") coolers; same idea as sweat evaporating off your skin cooling you off. The downside is that they increase humidity in the air, and if it's already pretty humid then that can make things uncomfortable. This means evaporative coolers are rarely used…
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Farewell, Google Maps
Haben Sie Zweifel? Sie wissen nicht, wo Sie das Präparat kaufen und wie Sie es mit anderen Medikamenten verwenden können? Fragen Sie einen Spezialisten.
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The tasting of surströmming
My experience with the (in)famous Nordic fermented fish.
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The Effect of Sleep on Happiness
Sleep and happiness: how are they correlated? In this happiness essay, I've analyzed 1.000 days of sleep and happiness in order to find out!
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The Absolute Denial of Shit
Today emoji are used by 92% of the world’s online population. The diminutive images have inspired a holiday and a $50 million animated movie. You can even make a living translating them. The Emojicon convention draws attendees from around the world. Topics of discussion at the 2018 gathering in Brooklyn include: “How…
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What Makes a Hit
Columbia Business School. For over 100 years, we’ve helped develop leaders who create value for business and society at large.
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Keeping a plaintext “did” file
Time flies by when you’re learning how to code. Its super important to take a second every once in a while to simple write down what you did during the past mental sprint. Writing down what you learned solidifies the knowledge.
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A Parable by Dijkstra (1973)
(Recently I found the following text in manuscript among old papers of mine. It must have been written in the middle of 1973, but I don't think that in the intervening three years it has lost anything of its significance. Hence I now incorporate it in the EWD-series.)
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How to take 7 years to ship a beta
Update (February, 2020): I finally shipped v1.0! Since this post I refactored the engine to support lower-end hardware, finished the macOS…
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The hotel bathroom puzzle
In his wonderful book The Evolution of Useful Things, the author and civil engineer Henry Petroski shares one of the most famous case studies in the history of design: Before it was destroyed by fi…
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Howl
I I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for…
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No Paper Is That Good
Last year, Noah Smith proposed his Two Paper Rule: If you want me to read the vast literature, cite me two papers that are exemplars and paragons of that literature. Foundational papers, key recent innovations – whatever you like (but no review papers or summaries). Just two. I will read them. If these two papers […]
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The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea
Not because there aren’t people who actually enjoy working in an open office, there are. Quite a few, actually. But they’re in the distinct minority. The vast majority of people either dislike the …