2041
Are any words the same in all languages?
Languages can be so different from each other—but there are a few words nearly all languages have in common! Can you guess which ones?
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,938 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
2042
Exploring EXIF
Exploratory interfaces for navigating photos
2043
Chinchilla’s death
“With more careful calculations, one can win; with less, one cannot” — Sun Tzu, The Art of War .
2044
2045
Harry Browne’s Rules of Financial Safety (1999)
When you read in the news that a person whom you know as rich and wealthy is in financial trouble or has declared bankruptcy, it is easy to feel a sense of futility about managing your own money. Y…
2046
Just Build It...
Thoughts on building, shipping and iterating quickly
2047
2048
2049
2050
On Craft
My grandpa -- my Missouri grandpa, who played slide guitar to me when I got homesick on the rare occasions I stayed with them -- grew up on a farm without electricity. He went past eighth grade, which really mattered to him. He loved that I played harp, which he always called "elegant," in an extremely Missouri…
2051
The B Lane Swimmer (2009)
A number of years ago, I joined a Master’s swim team. I was doing triathlons at the time, and the swim was my weakest leg. The team I joined divided the pool into four lanes: A (fastest swimmers), B (next fastest), C (next fastest) and D (slowest.) Workouts were organized accordingly; faster swimmers were assigned…
2052
2053
Teaching with AI
We’re releasing a guide for teachers using ChatGPT in their classroom—including suggested prompts, an explanation of how ChatGPT works and its limitations, the efficacy of AI detectors, and bias.
2054
New antifungal therapy for fungal meningitis
A team of University of Minnesota Medical School researchers successfully tested a new antifungal therapy to treat fungal meningitis. The trial results were published today in the peer-reviewed journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.
2055
2056
Absurd Success
So… I’ve had the most unreal week of coding. Zero exaggeration, I’ve halved the RAM requirements of the search engine, removed the need to take the system offline during an upgrade, removed hard limits on how many documents can be indexed, and quadrupled soft limits on how many keywords can be in the corpus. It’s been…
2057
My Caste
Allow me to introduce you to one of the largest population groups in India, as recognized by the constitution of India: Other Backward Classes ( OBC Category ). OBCs are estimated to comprise 40-45% of India's population, therefore, about 500 million people belong to OBC category. In other words, 1 in 16 people in the…
2058
A note to young folks: download the things you love
Many years ago, my favorite podcast was The Totally Rad Show. It was a fun video podcast where the hosts reviewed movies, games, TV shows, and other general nerd stuff. The hosts were Jeff Cannata (who last year I called the podcasting GOAT), Dan Trachtenberg (who went on to direct
2059
The Heart of W. Edwards Deming
“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” —Lao Tzu
2060
How to find time to learn after work (2017)
My software developer colleagues often ask me where I do get all the time for reading all the tech books or articles, watching conference talks and listening to podcasts. I analyzed my consumption for November and December and here is, what I did (and that's only the tech related content): List
2061
On being ready to die, and yet also now being able to swallow ice cream
Part of being ready to die comes, I think, from psychedelics; I wrote in “How do we evaluate our lives, at the end? What counts, what matters?”: “Bess (my wife) and psychedelics taught me to …
2062
Grades of quality of Panama hats
Montecristi Panama Hats, Men's, Women's, Fedoras, Foldable2023110 points48 commentsLife, Learning & Writing details
Grades of Quality of Panama Hats by Brent Black, the world's leading designer of fine quality Montecristi Panaman Hats.
2063
Lie still in bed
One of the most impactful pieces of advice I ever got was just to lie still in bed.
2064
Thoughts about what worked in math circles
Thoughts about what worked in math circles After about 7 months of math circles with a group of 7- turning 8-year-old boys and girls, I decided to take a...
2065
E-ink is so Retropunk
I’ve long been struggling to describe why e-ink is so much fun for me, but Ithink I’ve finally realized what it is: e-ink is just so so so retropunk.
2066
Earning the privilege to work on unoriginal problems
The startup world is almost by definition a place where you “live in the future”. Working in an early-stage startup, your whole belief system is based on being able to successfully create something new. Something that will become a great and cherished product, used all around the world. It needs to be this way, or…
2067
How to Read an RFC (2018)
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 significantly …
2068
Improving sleep
Things I tried to improve bad sleep quality.
2069
2070
So Long, Twitter and Reddit
It's been over three years since my last blog post. I think that the website code started to feel like it had bitrotted, and so making new blog posts became onerous. But I've taken the time to redo this website using Zig , so it's quite easy to add blog posts now, and plus I added dark mode .