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Electric bike, stupid love of my life
Reflections on eighteen months of electric bike ownership
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 669 posts.
272
Artists must be allowed to make bad work
Art critic David Sylvester on the perils of working too much in the public eye.
273
My favorite database shirts
Andy reviews his favorite NoSQL and NewSQL database shirts.
274
A case for toe socks
I love toe socks and I think you should too
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Carl Braun on communicating like a grown-up (2016)
Industrial genius Carl Braun believed that clear thinking and clear communication go hand in hand. Here the guide on writing productively to get things done.
276
Why the conventional wisdom on how to grow muscles is wrong
Everything the bros told you about how to train was wrong. Ok, not everything, obviously, but quite a lot of “everyone knows this” ideas turned out to be wrong. And after having lived and trained in over 50 countries, I think I know why. The origin of broscience People often ask me how they train in Taiwan or Ecuador…
277
Engineers should focus on writing
All engineers are good writers of code. I argue that they should also write non-code.
278
Of regrets
Here is a copy of the MIT license. One of the well-known open source licenses. It is, effectively, the only license that I’ve used for software I wrote or contributed in the last 10 years:
279
Robot Dad
See discussion of this post on Hacker News Tired of Alexa's feeble "here's what I found on wikianswerspam.com" responses to my eight-year-old son's science questions, I whipped up Robot Dad during...
280
The white furnace test
What;s up with those empty renders in rendering research papers? The white furnace test, one of my favourite rendering debug tools. It can be used to check several levels of implementation, not just the BRDF, but also the sampling and the Monte Carlo integration loop, Continue reading →
281
TODO apps are meant for robots
What if I'm a left-handed person in the world of right-handed tools?
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Is this a good book for me, now?
I used to believe that every book has an objective value. And I used to believe that this value is fixed and universal.
284
Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists
An unhinged polemic
285
Speed running Monkey Island
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
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Without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements—A Review
288
The Anti-Productivity Manifesto
After a barrage of recommendations on my twitter, I finally ended up reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks. The central premise of the book is simple: everyone has got about four thousand weeks to live, and spending that limited time chasing efficiency is wrongheaded. The message seems old. The entire…
289
Own-goal football (2022)
In a 1994 qualifying match for the Caribbean Cup, both Barbados and Grenada attempted to score deliberate own goals – because it was the best strategy available.
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Ask yourself dumb questions and answer them (2020)
Don’t just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical sp…
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Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)
The struggle for distinction
292
Memex is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed (2020)
How to keep an external brain using ideas from 1945 and technology from 2023.
293
You can't do that because I hate you
An infuriating pattern that devs need to stop.
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Internet search tips
A description of advanced tips and tricks for effective Internet research of papers/books, with real-world examples.
296
GPT makes learning fun again
What will GPT unlock for the nerdy kid sitting in a 7th-grade classroom today?
297
A complete guide to getting what you want (2018)
Note to reader: This is a long post – 2200 words – so bookmark it if you need to, but I think you’ll find it a worthwhile read if you apply this strategy even a single time. *...
298
Keep work fresh by teaching your successors and investing a bit in long-shots
If you’re doing what you’re told to do, they are paying you too much.
299
On keeping sketchbooks
Matt Kirkland is a designer. He probably reads too much.
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Bye, Gemini
The Gemini protocol was a big part of my COVID-19 lockdown experience. Discovering this underground, small protocol, having long discussions on the mailing list, and most importantly for me, developing software. My terminal Gemini browser, Amfora, was my first public FOSS project, something actually intended for a…