421
Local man switches to Arch, tells no one
Yesterday, at approximately 5:05pm, a Seattle area man installed Arch Linux on his home computer and has yet to tell anyone.
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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 560 posts.
422
Things I learned writing my first technical book
A hundred things I learned writing my first technical book “Data-Oriented Programming”
423
I Lost My Past (2017)
In almost all recent literature that analyzes Br-exit and Trump-entry, there is a constant theme of a fall from the heady days at the ...
424
Finding Your Swagger
This is a story about a time I lost my swagger.
425
We need your beginner’s mind
We need your experiments and your questions and your feedback. Your lack of understanding is a valuable attribute that goes away as you gain experience.
426
Moving from Hey to Fastmail
A summary on my personal experience and how you can do it too!
427
Spatial Audio
I got the following e-mail from a producer/engineer: “I just want to try and alert you to the potential seismic scam happening with this Atmos roll out. Â Atmos catalog remixing is being done…
428
The myth of the myth of the lone genius
The Myth of the Lone Genius is a bullshit cliche and we would do well to stop parroting it to young people like it is some deep insight into the nature of innovation.
429
An open letter to Jason and David
Dear Jason and David, aka the founder-owners of Basecamp who up until 2021 earned 100% of the company’s profits along with Jeff Bezos, As you know, I am writing this while on medical leave fr…
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Greens: why we eat the leaves that we do (2013)
Jeanne reveals which branches of the evolutionary tree of plants bear edible leaves and speculates about why that is. Most of the 300,000 + plant species have leaves, and the function of all of the…
432
Public Staircases
Create beautiful emails, automate campaigns, and track performance. Try it now and see how our tools can drive your business.
433
English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)
English is a (relatively) simple language to learn enough of to communicate (rather than to master) because it’s had so many non-native adults learning and using it.
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Driving 1725km in an electric car in 2 days
At 6:30 PM on Wednesday August 4 th my 15-year-old daughter and I pulled up the Jaguar I-Pace electric car in front of my 91-year-old Mom’s place in Regina, Saskatchewan. I was tired and achey because I’d just finished driving 1,725km (1,072 miles) across two days to see her for the first time since Covid started. I…
436
A Chemical Hunger: Mysteries
The study of obesity is the study of mysteries.
437
Alcohol, health, and the ruthless logic of the Asian flush
Why did the Asian flush evolve? What does this say about alcoholism? What does this have to do with Odysseus?
438
A Retrospective Look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard
Yes, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is as good as I remembered.
439
Reflections on software development from anywhere on an iPad
The Macbook Pro M1 is the software development laptop of choice yet I love my iPad considerably more. I'm all in with my thin client for hipsters. Here’s what I’ve learned over the months and how my baremetal homelab in the sky is setup.
440
In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)
examines claims that the big five personality traits is more scientifically valid than the myers briggs personality indicator
441
Am I stuck in a local maximum?
On long-standing controversies, biases, and failures of communication.
442
Book Review: Fussell on Class
Summary and commentary on Paul Fussell's "Class: A Guide Through The American Status System"
443
Teaching Machiavelli through his letters
Hello! It’s been a while since I posted since, as usual, many projects press, so it’s rare for me to have the time to write the kinds of polished essays I like sharing here. But I’ve been hoping to share more things, since a lot of the history work I’ve been doing lately has helped me with reflecting on current…
444
Don't Be Anti Car. Be Pro Something Else.
People hate change. They have something of a tendency to dig their heels in and be against it just because it is new and different. They as...
445
Lee Ross and the “Fundamental Attribution Error”
...and to the psychologist who put it on the map.
446
Why Read Classic Books?
This is my first attempt to “think out loud” about the question I get most often: why bother reading the Classics? This is still very much a work in progress: I think people don’t consider and adapt their own beliefs often enough (see also: mental liquidity ). I consider my opinions here to be very much loosely held…
447
Watermelons
This week we nerd out on watermelons (available May to October). All living beings on Earth constantly search for water—tree roots grow into cracked or leaky underground pipes to access the water they carry, camels can go a full week without drinking thanks to the unique water-storage capacity of their oval-shaped red…
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Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal
Using your phone as a dumb terminal with a Bluetooth keyboard
450
Hydrofoiling
I was standing on a floating dock on a Pacific-ocean inlet, a place where it’s obvious why motorboats are such an environmental disaster. Fortunately lots of other people have noticed too and it looks increasingly that more people will be able to enjoy Messing About In Boats without feeling like they’re making Greta…