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The Peking Duck Exemption
Most food safety regulations say that Peking duck should be illegal. But it's not, so what gives?
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 715 posts.
572
Twenty questions is a weird game
Let’s play a game. I’m thinking of a number from 1 to 100. You guess, and I tell you whether my number is higher or lower.
573
Growing food in hard clay
Improve even the worst soils and close your dependency loops.
574
Getting Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable
Software engineering is cursed with uncertainty. When we’re solving big new problems with software, if the exact problem has been solved before, we could just reuse the solution that already exists. Frequently though, the exact problem (or combination of problems) hasn’t been solved before, and we need to come up with…
575
Quest for my perfect watch
I love my Casio Protrek watch, I won’t leave the house without it. I’ve owned it for years, as well as some earlier Protrek models. Those earlier models didn’t break — these watches are basically indestructible — I just liked them so much I went and bought the new revisions!
576
Don't compare yourself to other entrepreneurs
Everyone says don't compare yourself to other people. It can be easier said than done. I'm going to run through how I avoid comparing myself
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Why T-shaped people? (2018)
Read this story without a paywall
579
Too Much Internet
I consider myself fairly “up” with popular trends. Perhaps I don’t know every celebrity crush, or every new thing that every TikTok…
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Meditations on an inexpensive laundry basket
I’m down to a cost of 20¢ a year and falling.
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That’s how it works when you’re a woman on the internet
Aubrey Hirsch on harassment and existing as a woman online
583
I started taking English classes at the age of 46
Finding a tutor despite already being fluent.
584
The fine art of Italian hand gestures: A vintage visual dictionary (2012)
A pocket guide to Neapolitan nonverbal communication.
585
Zettelkasten, linking your thinking, and Nick Milo's search for ground
Linked thinking and the many "tools for thought" apps that have been released over the past few years, have changed the discourse on how we take in and proce...
586
I don't want to go to Chel-C
We are constantly reading of stories with one main theme where people turn to seemingly "simple" systems in order to manage complexity; except that these systems manage to produce complex problems, without having to acquire historical cruft, or suffering from any of the usual issues that produce non-essential…
587
A report on exercise and sleep (2021)
News outlets broadly got the message right, but not sure about some of the numbers.
588
The rabbit hole of adding grain to digital photos
If you don’t know already, I’m the kind of photographer who loves a lot of grain in my photos. I like it so much that I’ve made several videos about
589
Lessons from Owning a Bookstore
I’ve done some crazy things in my life, but as I’ve said, the absolute craziest was deciding to open a bookstore. Running a small business is always difficult, running a small business during a pandemic is damn near impossible but a small town book store in rural Texas? But here we are, a year later, not just still…
590
Not as famous as they should be (2021)
Some people in computing are famous, some are not. Sometimes the fame is proportional to their contributions to computing, sometimes it's not. That's how life and the world works: the winners write the history. Financial success and personal charisma are often deemed more interesting than quietly doing your work…
591
Put it on the crazy pile: Ideas and creativity
Being an academic, I am (sort of) being paid 1 to come up with new ideas about my research field, potential applications, and the future. When I was just starting out, one of my fears was that I would not be able to come up with sufficiently good ideas. All my professors had these great ideas—would I ever be at their…
592
Tools for a Culture of Writing (2021)
A set of useful tools for cultivating a culture of writing, namely the RFC, the Decision Record and Decision Log, and the Pre-mortem/Prospective and Post-mortem/Retrospective
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Leonardo Syndrome
Ever heard of Leonardo Syndrome? If you’ve read Peter Burke’s excellent book, The Polymath,[^1] then you will have done, but if not: Leonardo Syndrome is...
596
The map is not the territory (2015)
The map is not the territory reminds us that our mental models of the world are not the same as the world itself. It cautions against confusing our abstractions and representations with the complex, ever-shifting reality they aim to describe.
597
What I do when I feel like giving up (2015)
I am struggling today, and maybe you are too. Don't give up yet, though. Read this article to learn what I remind myself of when I want to give up...
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Modernizing my 1980s sound system
Where the last two posts were primarily about software ( Navidrome and beets , respectively), this post will be more about hardware (and a bit of software to control it). Hopefully it’ll be useful to others with older sound hardware, especially those who are compelled (as I am) to avoid buying a “connected” device…
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Resources to encourage children to learn to code
6 Interesting Resources to Encourage Your Child to Learn to Code