Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,940 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
Types of Garden Hoe
Are there really just a few basic types? We describe what they are, what they do, and how to adjust and tweak them for the best performance.
What’s Wrong with “Multiplication Is Repeated Addition”? (2008)
[Photo by Alejandra Mavroski.] Myrtle called it The article that launched a thousand posts…, and counting comments on this and several other blogs, that may not be too much of an exaggeration…
There are not enough BTUs
Y'all ready for it?
The Effect of Noise on Sleep
Using Apple Watch noise and sleep stages to quantify the effect of noise on sleep
Dating: A mysterious constellation of facts
Are speed dating and network effects contradictory?
Working on an iPad Pro as my main computer
tl;dr I can do all of my programming and system admin work with an iPad Pro because I work on remote servers over ssh, and I prefer using the Unix/Linux command line.
Why I teach vim
The why of why people use vim has been covered fairly extensively, so I thought I would spend a little time explaining why I teach vim to my high school students, even in 2020. It all began when I …
Importance of muscle mass, strength and cardiorespiratory fitness for longevity
"If you have the aspiration of kicking ass when you're 85, you can't afford to be average when you're 50." —Peter Attia
Why I use the IBM Model M keyboard that is older than me
The last primary keyboard I’ll use in my life might be the IBM Model M. It’ll probably last me the decades to the day that keyboards should become obsolete. - Kheng Meng, 2018 I just had to start my blog post with that self quote ^^^ but I’m pretty confident it’ll hold true for me. I have owned several keyboards so…
My 2022 self was wrong about meditation, monitors, and sleep
Introduction When I read Richard Hanania’s Reflections on 2022 in which he listed a bunch of major topics he changed his mind about, I realized that I really admired him for doing this. Then, immediately afterwards, I thought “Wait, am I worse than Hanania? The person who made the entire twitter angry at him more…
That time when I accidentally social engineered myself to a film set
I spent the last week in Toronto in the Cpp North conference . It was so much fun just to hang around with people after such a long pause.My...
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.
Story of Vitamin D Toxicity (2022)
How much Vitamin D should I take? This is still the looming question, and it’s time to address it. First, though, imagine that someone in a public forum online asked me, “How much metoprolol (a…
You can't dig upwards
When I first learned to drive a car, shortly after turning 15, my mother insisted that I learn on my father’s Mazda Miata: a silver, two-door convertible with a soft-top roof.
Ali, what’s up
From time to time I buy stuff on AliExpress, mostly electronics. It has such a huge amount of items available which amazes me every time. Lots of quality stuff and lots of lesser quality stuff. Today, I found that it has rather strange text in the placeholder for the search box when the site is displayed in Dutch:
Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes
Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes: Sharing my journey of downsizing my digital storage, letting go of terabytes of data, and moving away from a NAS setup. I decided to use an external Thunderbolt SSD enclosure and an M.2 NVMe SSD to store my data locally. For cloud backup and encryption, I used the Arq…
Times I've Messed Up as a Developer
Those two times where I clearly had no clue what I was doing as a developer Last week I had a short conversation with coworkers about how we had messed up in our careers. Being so far removed from …
My old job feels distant now
I can hardly remember first experiencing ChatGPT. Its become so infused into my professional life, that going back to that first moment, or moments, is difficult. Instead a blur of a few moments. At some point, I realized it was a better Google. It was very similar to when Stackoverflow took off, and how Google search…
The internet as existential threat
Some days I wonder if we are completely screwed. So today’s post is a perhaps slightly hysterical outburst.
On Learning Smalltalk
Summary: In 2021 I learned Smalltalk, mostly using the lovely Pharo implementation. While the syntax of the language is quite nice, it...
Lessons from a fountain pen addict
(Enjoy the blog? Please consider donating – there’s a PayPal button at the top right of the site!) Over the past several years of spending far too much time and money on stationery, I’ve learned a thing or two — about mistakes I make over and over, about what I like and why, and what […]
Getting a job in San Francisco
You’re living outside the US and want to get a job in San Francisco? This might help you getting one.
How much things can change
This post is about how much things can change in the world over a lifetime. I’m going to restrict my attention to science, though there are many parallels in technology, human rights, and social justice.