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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 473 posts.
Haskell is a programming language invented sometime in the 20th century by Scottish logicians as a prank. ¹ Fifteen years or so ago, for reasons I can no longer remotely recall, I started learning Haskell. Now, I have finally written a useful program in Haskell, and I am pretty sure I can do it again, if I ever need…
I’m getting married pretty soon, and I figured it’d be fun to make my own rings. I’d seen a Nile Red video where he made purple gold, and the process seemed simple enough: Make a mold, pour some mol…
My child is 3 years old. I was looking for a game that we could play together and would be her first programming-like activity. I wasn’t keen to teach her anything specifically but rather offer her the option to explore what coding or algorithmic thinking tasted like (similarly when you would give your child a sheet…
Yes, you can make money writing books. But never do it for that.
How come so many of the most talented engineers of our time work on making our entertainment more immersive?
The Great Ball Contraption is a class of machines built with Lego that transport small balls from place to place in many different ways. The otherwise pointless
One year ago today, I went into surgery expecting that I’d lose half my tongue to a squamous cell carcinoma recurrence. The evening before, Bess and I got legally married;[1] it was a short, but ch…
A Hackernews comment introduces a new character
Electricity prices have been steadily rising in France for the past few years, with a particularly sharp increase since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This has led me to wonder about my own electricity consumption and how I could optimize it. The hardware Since 2015, the organization managing the…
AI, science, education, & ethics
<p>Yesterday, we gave away our ~6-year-old GE French-door refrigerator after a never-ending slog of repairs. At least the guy and his mother who came to pick it up have a side-hustle of repairing and reselling appliances. There's hope it won't end up in a landfill. He offered to sell me a 4-door Samsung. No Thanks!…
A short story on why I still go through the effort of self hosting servers and some things it taught me recently.
HATETRIS is the world's hardest version of Tetris; it's Tetris that hates you. In this post, we chronicle our eleven-month journey to get the world record, and some of our wrong turns along the way.
And maybe it wasn't that long to begin with
A fun side project for a great cause featuring Core Motion, SwiftUI, a little help from AI, and a pair of AirPods to count 100 push-ups a day.
The first entry on this blog was 20 years ago yesterday, first substantive one was 20 years ago tomorrow (first one that drew attacks on me as an incompetent was two days later). Back when I starte…
In 1995, El Salvador had an intentional homicide rate of 139 per 100,000, the highest in the world and one of the highest rates recorded in modern history. Like all educated middle-class Americans,…
By Ruben Schade in Eora/Sydney, Australia.
A few years ago, my cat gave me my most memorable middle of the night software engineering incident. I was working at a startup, and we didn’t have a formal on-call rotation yet. That was a deliberate decision, since being on-call is painful, and the team was good about just collectively keeping an eye out for urgent…
Walk into any Japanese convenience store and you will always find a shelf dedicated to one item: onigiri. The onigiri, often translated as “rice ball”, literally means “grasping a fistful” and is in many ways Japan's original fast food, before fast food. Quick to make, quick to eat, easy
Several years ago I had the chance to lead two seminars with a group of high-performing Chinese high school seniors. Each seminar had between 20-35 kids; each of these students was a graduating sen…
If you've been wondering why entries have been a little slow lately, let me tell you a story. All collectors tend to be a bit obsessive by ...
It’s been three years since the inception of Marginalia Search, then a dinky experiment to find where the heck the cool Internet has gone, now my full time job. While there’s always things that can be improved, it’s fair to say the search engine has never worked as well as it does right now. A great number of…
So many people I’ve worked with have used multiple displays – typically a matched pair side-by-side – and sworn by them. It’s always mystified me, to be honest.
Money: how to get people to give it to you, how much to ask for, and how to be worth what you're asking. Some real talk about the challenges you’ll face as a newly independent worker.
My tech posts often come from kind of a negative place. I wish it wasn't like that, but we all know how the mind works: writing with nuance and positivity is a lot harder than fired-up screeds of the "someone is wrong on the Internet" variety.
