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I have been writing a niche history blog for 15 years
A special appeal to support Res Obscura on its Crystal Anniversary
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,939 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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Aaron Swartz: What Happens in The Dark Knight
As we’ve discussed, in Batman Begins 1960s-style full employment and antipoverty programs lead to skyrocketing crime while in The Dark Knight Rises 1980s-style tough-on-crime policies and neoliberal economics lead to a revolt of the economic underclass. The films are mirror images, one about the failure of liberal…
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Observations from our Joe Rogan Experience experience
And other observations from our Joe Rogan Experience experience
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Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)
How I started using Linux and the things I love about Arch Linux
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Apology
After talking to two team members who recalled our staff meeting at the 2018 Racket Summer School better than I did, I think I can put myself into your shoes now.
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A Programmer's Loss of Identity
This is the follow-up to last year’s I’m an American software developer and the "broligarchs" don’t speak for me . In that essay, I tried to express why I was so agonized by the leaders in my industry doing a speedrun towards dystopia and how it all felt so divorced from what technology could, and should be…
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How I Spend My Attention
What you pay attention to becomes your life.
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Have Taken Up Farming
ex program, en farm
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Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics
By Michael Nielsen, January 2019
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Become a morning person. How to end insomnia for $520.99
I have delayed sleep phase syndrome, a common form of insomnia. Sound familiar anyone?
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On the death of my family's dairy farm
This Christmas, like every other, I traveled to northern Wisconsin to stay with my parents on the dairy farm I grew up on.
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It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak
Well not really - just don’t practice for a day right? Oh wait, streak freezes. OK, don’t practice for a couple of days. Three? No, five? No, more! What?
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Are you nice or kind?
Last week Avi and I went outside to unbury our car after the storm, a task we assumed we could do ourselves but ultimately involved our whole neighborhood.
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Comedy Theory (2022)
Create and run awesome TTRPG adventures. Games, tools, and resources for storytellers, roleplayers, improvisers, and game masters.
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Another Day Has Come
If you agree that Apple itself was It’s hard to imagine a more orderly, confidence-inspiring, exciting-but-not-at-all-surprising, this-feels-right way to do this.
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What if I were 1% charged? (2013)
In case you hadn’t heard, the universe is governed by four fundamental forces. But when it comes to understanding nature at almost any level larger than a nucleus and smaller than a planet, …
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I analysed 20 years of my chats
Importing 1.2 million messages from Telegram, VK, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter into a structured Obsidian vault with local LLM inference - to measure how my friendships work with decay curves, vocabulary shifts, directional sentiment, and conflict rates.
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How to be a good listener
The secrets that will make you much better at listening to a degree that your relationships are significantly more successful, peaceful, gratifying, intimate, and trusting, have to do with what you…
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Possibly a Serious Possibility
How 'lurking weasel' phrases skewed Cold War intelligence
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Reasons I didn't become an EMT, ranked
Here are 21 reasons I delayed getting my EMT licensed, sorted loosely by ridiculousness.