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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,939 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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How to avoid being a secretary for engineers (2018)
If we just see our task as documenting solutions that engineers have solved, it removes the creativity and critical thinking dimension from tech comm. The creative dimension in tech comm comes into play as we identify and solve tech comm challenges, such as devising ways to simplify complexity or otherwise improve the…
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What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon
You’ve probably heard that the Rust type checker can be a great “co-pilot”, helping you to avoid subtle bugs that would have been a royal pain in the !@#!$! to debug. This is truly awesome! But what you may not realize is how it feels in the moment when this happens. The answer typically is: really, really…
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‘Anti-hunger’ molecule forms after exercise, scientists discover
Stanford Medicine researchers and their collaborators have identified a molecule that staves off hunger post-exercise.
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Advice for academic refugees
Recently I met a new coworker, a now-former professor who left academia.
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Sleeping longer than 6.5 hours/day can help you lose weight: study
According to a recent study, sleeping an extra hour could help you lose weight if you're not sleeping enough to begin with
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Mental Model: Difficult Problems vs. Hard Work
How to model work that interacts with ambiguity
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Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
Utopian energy is an imagined form of energy that’s abundant, reliable, inexpensive, and also clean, renewable, and life-sustaining. But utopian energy is as much a fantasy as a utopian society. Seeking the fount of perfect energy allows us to pretend there aren’t real-world tradeoffs between, say,
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Potato diet community trial
In French, the word for potato is pomme de terre. This literally translates to apple of the earth. By this logic, potatoes are the lowest-hanging fruit of all. More seriously: We keep getting more …
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Observations on 6 Years of Journaling
My thoughts and experiences on how writing a daily journal improved my memory and understanding of myself.
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An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
As a hackathon project at our recent team offsite, Mati and I hacked together a quick experiment to test whether Bionic Reading actually works. Initial results suggest not, but there are some glimmers in the data justifying a revised experiment correcting the mistakes of our pilot study. If you have 10 minutes to read…
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One year as a solo dev building open-source data tools without funding
I quit my job as an engineering manager at Oracle in early June 2021. I had a bit of savings and a few contract opportunities so I decided to see how far I could get building an app I've wanted for years as a manager. I have never built my own app before and I've never built a desktop app before.
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The Documentation Triangle, or, why code isn't self documenting
These statements can be hard to argue against, especially if they come from someone who is more experienced than you. A lot of the trouble is that they are not wrong – well, they’re not completely wrong.
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On leaving Mapbox after 12 years
It’s been about nine months since I left Mapbox and the circumstances of my exit didn’t offer much opportunity for closure. I feel a combination of gratitude and resentment that I’m still sorting out. Last week was the one year anniversary of the Mapbox Worker’s Union going public, the event that lead to my departure…
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Writing one sentence per line
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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No-one knows what they are doing
When I was a child I assumed that all the adults running the world knew what they were doing. Now that I am an adult, I am under no such illusions. Just look at the current British government. They…
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Two Years of Life with PinePhone
On June 9th, 2020, early into a still raging pandemic, I received my PinePhone UBports Community Edition. It's incredible how fast these two years went by, and how much the PinePhone experience improved in the meantime. This is just a subjective post about what I remember, you may also consider it a
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Reasons to tour by bicycle
I recommend a long bicycle tour as one of the best ways to see parts of the world, especially America. There was an article in a recent New York Times about 8 great bike touring routes in the US. These … Continue reading →
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Relearning to Learn
Many years ago, I took a test. It was the first step of our “Learning to Learn” class. After answering a series of multiple choice question, the form issued forth a proclomation:
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You and Your Research (1986)
Little has been written on managing your own research (and very little on avoiding other people managing your research); however, your research is much more under your control than you may realize.
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Construction is life
When I was growing up in the suburbs, I was bothered by all the construction going on in the big city nearby (New York). Whenever I visited, there were detours, cranes, cement trucks blocking the streets, never-ceasing jackhammers, sidewalks closed, … Continue reading →
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Probiotics can support the effect of antidepressants
Intestinal flora plays an important role in health – including mental health. Researchers from the University of Basel and the University Psychiatric Clinics Basel (UPK) have shown that probiotics can support the effect of antidepressants and help to alleviate depression.
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I'm making drugs for cats
For all the new readers who’ve joined since my post about effective altruism and elections, welcome!
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Tolkien’s Little-Known Original Drawings for the First Edition of “The Hobbit”
A lively new look at one of the most beloved fantasy stories of all time.
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Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura
Did you know Clarus the Dogcow is hiding in the macOS Ventura beta?
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Writing Is Hard
Writing is hard. Especially if you start thinking. Never stop to think about what to write (unless you must), it will ruin the flow. Never stop to correct yourself, to judge or run a spellcheck. Don’t do that; that’s what editing is for. I’ve read the same tips again and again: Write first, edit later. […]