The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,937 posts.
Spaced repetition is complicated in hierarchical bodies of knowledge, like mathematics, because repetitions on advanced topics should trickle down to update the repetition schedules of simpler topics that are implicitly practiced (while being discounted appropriately since these repetitions are often too early to…
Earlier today Stephen Johnson, in a mailing list run by the The Unix Heritage Society , described the birth of the standard error concept: the idea that a program's error output is sent on a channel different from that of its normal output. Over the past forty years, all major operating systems and language libraries…
Surviving 3 years in North Korea as a foreign diplomat was not easy. Living and working in the Hermit Kingdom was certainly the unique experience of a lifetime.
We're open-sourcing a tool that may be useful to people who develop code on NixOS and distribute it in binary form.
I’m getting married pretty soon, and I figured it’d be fun to make my own rings. I’d seen a Nile Red video where he made purple gold, and the process seemed simple enough: Make a mold, pour some mol…
Last winter, I rode a ski lift alongside a guy who claimed to be a retired Olympic ski tuner. Ski tuning, he said, was all a scam. If you keep your skis dry between days out they’ll stay sharp for their entire lifetime. Don’t get him started on waxing. His specific claim was that skis get blunt from corrosion, and all…
The thought behind the thought
A review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, exploring how social media and overprotective parenting affect children’s mental health.
Electricity prices have been steadily rising in France for the past few years, with a particularly sharp increase since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This has led me to wonder about my own electricity consumption and how I could optimize it. The hardware Since 2015, the organization managing the…
Las Vegas’ $2.3 billion immersive flagship takes a distressingly prophetic look inward.
How to maximize 10x work and avoid thoughtless daily 1x work routines
500 priests, cartographic n00bism, and the limits of scale
HATETRIS is the world's hardest version of Tetris; it's Tetris that hates you. In this post, we chronicle our eleven-month journey to get the world record, and some of our wrong turns along the way.
Programmers should be paranoid.
Four lines of code … it was four lines of code
Yes, you can make money writing books. But never do it for that.
Overcoming any addiction is hard. Sugar is very addictive and bad for your health. Here's my journey fighting with that addiction so far in case it can help anyone out there.
In the past 12 months my body’s mobility and flexibility went from abysmal, a source of persistent pain impacting my quality of life, to pretty darn good. I’m not about to become a stretching influencer, but after a year of researching, trial and error, and hard work I feel back on track and like I... Continue reading…
I'm creating an app that started as a simple note-taking tool but has now grown into a full-fledged project way beyond what I could have imagined. Let me tell…
Manufacturers take a conservative approach and specify the life of Li-ion in most consumer products as being between 300 and 500 discharge/charge cycles.…
Over the summer, I spent about two weeks in Tajikistan, mostly in Dushanbe (the capital) and various points along the Pamir Highway, which borders Afghanistan and later leads into Kyrgyzstan. This …
A major online publication once reported in a profile on me that I had retired at 33. A few old friends and acquaintances reached out to congratulate me on my financial ind...
The history of every major galactic civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Wh…
by Felienne Hermans
Image courtesy of UC Davis. Photographer: Don EdwardsJust in time for cucumber season, some news that surprises me. Did you know that you should store cucumbers at room temperature?Credit for my enlightenment goes to UC Davis.
Haskell is a programming language invented sometime in the 20th century by Scottish logicians as a prank. ¹ Fifteen years or so ago, for reasons I can no longer remotely recall, I started learning Haskell. Now, I have finally written a useful program in Haskell, and I am pretty sure I can do it again, if I ever need…
How to turn something as ordinary as an USB-C cable into something that a lot of nerds will want to buy.
