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In defense of interesting writing on controversial topics
Some thoughts on the New York Times' Slate Star Codex profile
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 640 posts.
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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.
575
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
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The new reading stack
A world beyond Amazon
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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...
587
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…