1801
Finding the Air Cannon
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,937 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
1802
How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent
This is a blog post aimed at people who want to do important work or make meaningful contributions to work, but feel they aren’t that smart and don’t have any talent. Thanks for reading Adaobi’s Newsletter!
1803
I need to grow away from these roots
Installation artwork by Vitling
1804
A parliament of owls and a murder of crows: How groups of birds got their names
Language is an instrument of great precision and poignancy — our best tool for telling each other what the world is and what we are, for conveying the blueness of blue and the wonder of being…
1805
PinePhone review after a month of daily driving
All opinions are my own, and most of the review is for my own use-cases. There are some comparisons, mostly for entertainment purposes, to iOS (based on my previous device, iPhone 12 Pro) and Android (based on my current device, de-googled OnePlus Nord N10 5G).
1806
1807
Balancing Outdoor Risky Play and Injury Prevention in Childhood Development
Free play is essential for children’s development and for their physical, mental, and social health. Opportunities to engage in outdoor free play—and risky play in particular—have declined significantly in recent years, in part because safety measures have sought to prevent all play-related injuries rather than…
1808
Heat exchanger masks for cold weather cycling (2019)
(updated, March 2025) How I Started Caring About Heat Exchanger Masks Back in the 90s I started riding my bike to work after a hiatus of a few years. My coworkers would regularly ask me if I was go…
1809
2023 Letter
A walk-and-talk; Crumb; running and tangping; Knausgaard; Elon as Palmer Eldritch; memelords; Chicago as a megacity; Norton; and a pause.
1810
My toddler still loves planes, so I upgraded her radar
An adorable set of release notes
1811
An RNG that runs in your brain
Humans are notoriously bad at coming up with random numbers. I wanted to be able to quickly generate “random enough” numbers. I’m not looking for anything that great, I just want to be able to come up with the random digits in half a minute. Some looking around brought me to an old usenet post by George Marsaglia…
1812
1813
1814
Lessons learned from bringing promotional sweets to a conference
I've recently set up my own consultancy company and decided to sponsor my local UKGovCamp conference. That entitled me to a logo on the site, a shout-out during the conference, and place to put any promotional stickers. Everyone loves stickers! But I decided to bring along something different - promotional sweeties! I…
1815
Snowcraft – Building a Lego Snowfort from giant Lego snow-bricks
In the heart of winter, our family found joy in transforming freshly fallen snow into giant Lego-like bricks using the tops of storage bins. The children eagerly assembled these into a grand snowfort, crafting an impressive igloo with walls sturdy enough to host their snowy adventures. As dusk fell,
1816
Four Magic Words
Long ago, in a parallel universe three doors down and one to the left of our own, OpenAI headquarters found itself in chaos. A klaxon blared overhead as red lights began flashing. A message played over a loud-speaker: “Warning! Warning! This is not a drill! Artificial General Intelligence window
1817
Relearning math as an adult
I recently passed 100 days of practicing math every single day 💯 I’ve wanted to beef up my math chops for a while, but I needed a good reason that would justify the time investment. Plus…
1818
Losing my son
On October 20th, my seven year old son Nikolas suffered cardiac arrest while undergoing a procedure at the hospital to treat an underlying congenital condition. The doctors performed CPR and succeeded in reviving him but ultimately he suffered catastrophic brain damage. My wife and I were in the hospital for
1819
1820
Why don't schools teach debugging, or, more fundamentally, fundamentals?
If you find this piece worthwhile, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding ongoing cancer care. A story from Dan Luu, from back when he “TA’ed EE 202, a second year class on signals and systems at P…
1821
Japan's Comfort Food: The Onigiri
Walk into any Japanese convenience store and you will always find a shelf dedicated to one item: onigiri. The onigiri, often translated as “rice ball”, literally means “grasping a fistful” and is in many ways Japan's original fast food, before fast food. Quick to make, quick to eat, easy
1822
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
Why is everyone in such a rush? Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced search for [ title: teach, yourself, hours, since: 2000 and found 512 such books…
1823
Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk
Språkrådet arbeider for å styrke det norske språket og språkmangfoldet. Språkrådet er statens forvaltningsorgan i språkspørsmål og følger opp den norske språkpolitikken.
1824
Cars suck, man
What better way to start off the new year than with a little rant.
1825
1826
My Knowledge Lakehouse
1 There’re only three entities: log, list, structure.
1827
How to Be More Agentic
On a supposedly difficult thing
1828
Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)
[This is a slightly edited repost of an essay from my old LiveJournal] A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid a…
1829
We need technology that is less immersive, not more
How come so many of the most talented engineers of our time work on making our entertainment more immersive?
1830
Signs that it's time to leave a company
When the company stops growing, when the founder moves on, when HR is calling the shots, when the executives care more about real estate…