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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 640 posts.
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Forget Twitter Threads; Write a Blog Post Instead
All of the kool kids in Twitter land seem to be jumping on the bandwagon of a very annoying craze. Twitter threads. Please stop; write a blog post instead
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Willingness to look stupid
People frequently 1 think that I'm very stupid. I don't find this surprising, since I don't mind if other people think I'm stupid, which means that I don't adjust my behavior to avoid seeming stupid, which results in people thinking that I'm stupid. Although there are some downsides to people thinking that I'm stupid…
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Overly analytical guide to escorting
The Overly Analytical Guide to Escorting
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A Meta-Scientific Perspective on Thinking: Fast and Slow (2020)
2011 was an important year in the history of psychology, especially social psychology. First, it became apparent that one social psychologist had faked results for dozens of publications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel). Second, a highly respected journal published an article with the incredible claim…
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What to Learn
It's common to see people advocate for learning skills that they have or using processes that they use. For example, Steve Yegge has a set of blog posts where he recommends reading compiler books and learning about compilers. His reasoning is basically that, if you understand compilers, you'll see compiler problems…
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Alan Kay on the context and catalysts of personal computing
Alan Kay — “father of personal computers" — is best known for his work on personal computing and for leading the team that developed Smalltalk.
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Pursue High-Quality Leisure
If I stop surfing the Internet, what am I going to do all day?
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Gell-Mann Amnesia
Michael Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann Amnesia effect to describe forgetting how unreliable a source is in one area when you trust it in another area.
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On Receiving my Certificate of Loss of Nationality
Five months after my renunciation day, I received my Certificate of Loss of Nationality today. People keep asking me how that feels...
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Pink Floyd's Young Lust – explained and demystified
Pink Floyd’s Young Lust has been a staple of rock radio for over 40 years. But many people are mystified about the section at the end when a “Mr. Floyd” in the United States attempts to make a collect call to “Mrs. Floyd” in England. There are many “beeps” and “boops” that for the untrained ear are just random sounds…
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Always Do Extra
A simple rule that every good, veteran programmer seems to follow with respect to managing their time.
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And you will know us by the company we keep
It feels as if we're at the tail end of the first era of social media in the West. Looking back at the companies that have survived, certain application architectural choices are ubiquitous. By now, we're all familiar with the infinite vertical scrolling feed of content units, the likes, the follows, the comments, the…
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My first industry job: lies, deceptions, and layoffs
My first job was both a blessing and a nightmare. It taught me more about the world than about software development, but those lessons were invaluable.
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Worst Case
Suppose you’re running your organization’s crucial apps in the cloud. Specifically, suppose you’re running them them on AWS, and in particular in the “us-east-1” region? Could us-east-1 go away? What might you do about it? Let’s catastrophize!
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Sending Emails to Myself
In April, I wrote operatornotify.py , a module which allows my programs to notify me of important information or errors. I was immediately very proud of it. It felt awesome to get so much impact out of a sub-100 line module as I went around hooking it up to my existing programs and getting the tracebacks from my…
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Multitasking Doesn't Work
When we think we’re multitasking, most often we aren’t really doing two things at once, but instead, individual actions in rapid succession.
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Explaining explaining: a quick guide on explanatory writing
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
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Thoughts on chess improvement, after gaining 600 points in 6 months
I played chess briefly with my friends in high school, where I had a rating of around 1100 online. I gave up the game for about 10 years, then picked it back up again recently, in May. I’ve tried a ton of different approaches in the past 6 months, switching things up whenever I stopped seeing results. I’ve improved…
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Intermittent fasting in mice improves long-term memory retention
Intermittent Fasting is an effective means of improving long term memory retention and generating new adult hippocampal neurons in mice
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Curiosity Is Better Than Being Smart?
Are you smart? Are you curious? Which one is better? Well, in this post, you will see why curiosity is better than being smart.
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Why obsessively following successful people online is dangerous
Convincing yourself that following more famous people online will lead to a better life is dangerous. You're simply wasting your time.
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The big alcohol study that didn't happen
Why did a huge alcohol RCT get cancelled? A strange story of science, academia, bureaucratic maneuvering, ambition, politics, capitalism, the deep state, secret emails, and slippery ethical slopes.
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John Carpenter’s “Planaria”: Or, the New Individualism
It happened for me back in the eighties, when I encountered the definition of “Life” in Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker : “Information, shaped by natural selection”. That concise distillation—an actual description of what life is , as opposed to all those tired and exception-prone checklists that only talk about what…
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Things Unlearned
One of my favorite questions to ask people is: what are some things that you used to strongly believe but have now changed your mind about?
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The code worked differently when the moon was full
I love a good bug, especially ones that are initially hard to explain but then ...
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Revenge Bedtime Procrastination
This is the Sunday edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.