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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 530 posts.
I’ve tried Notion, Obsidian, Things, Apple Reminders, Apple Notes, Jotter and endless other tools to keep me organised and sure, Notion has stuck around the most because we use it for client stuff, but for todo lists, all of the above are way too complicated. I’ve given up this week and gone back to paper […]
NOTE: This is a companion post to my piece in Public Books, "The Encylopedia Project: Or, how to know in…
Electrical baby toys are interesting to disassemble and look at how it’s made. Not up to the …
A swords-and-sorcery programming environment for building and counting mathematical structures
The second part of this talk pursues some of the scientific and educational consequences of the assumption that computers represent a radical novelty. In order to give this assumption clear contents, we have to be much more precise as to what we mean in this context by the adjective "radical". We shall do so in the…
My microwave oven started to malfunction at around five years old. It started to randomly power on the lamp, fan, and turntable. It progressively got worse over several weeks until it was mostly stuck on. The microwave oven is not usable when this happens: It behaves as if the door were open, causing the control panel…
Lessons from An Unexpected Year in AI
How Dostoevsky’s Crafted Timeless Art
Personality basins are a mental model that I use to reason about humans within their environment: from modelling why people are they way they are, how they change over time, how mental illnesses and addiction function along with how we should look for their cures, and how the attention economy optimizes itself to…
I spent about ten days in the Ivory Coast, mostly in Abidjan, but also Yamoussoukro, Man, and Grand Bassam. (Note – The Ivory Coast is so French in culture and temperament that it insists on offici…
I missed it, but last month I had my 20-year blogging anniversary. Let's recap a bit about how it started and how it went.
I prefer a lightweight nonfiction book to a detailed tome. I’m a dilettante of many interests, so my attention for any given topic is more likely to sustain 100 pages than 600. The sweet spot is longer than a longread internet article, but that doesn’t demand a months-long commitment: a 2-3 hour text.
In addition to the basic materials, a number of safety-related items were needed to conduct this experiment. First, a suitable location for the experiment was required, it being expected that the kitchen was not the appropriate place for blow-torching SPTs. The author's driveway was chosen as a suitable site. Second…
Reflecting on comics that resonated for me in 2023
When Simplicity is Preferrable to Efficiency
Looking for Alice, part 3
I’ve always wanted to visit Market Village, but I never will. And neither will you.
Earlier today Stephen Johnson, in a mailing list run by the The Unix Heritage Society , described the birth of the standard error concept: the idea that a program's error output is sent on a channel different from that of its normal output. Over the past forty years, all major operating systems and language libraries…
Cutting out the news has been one of the best lifestyle decisions I've made in recent years, second only to cutting out social media (though the two are not mutually exclusive). Reducing my intake of what is essentially junk information has significantly reduced anxiety and worry in my day to day life, and has freed…
On volcanoes, crises, and what we can learn from Icelanders
I am an advocate of regenerative farming . But I’m not a farmer myself. The piece of land I steward is 1/3 acre — still sizable for an urban lot, but laughably minuscule compared to what Real Farmers are working with.
Just intonation (JI) today falls under the umbrella of microtonal music, because it involves playing "between the notes" of the 12-tone scale we're used to. As I type microtonal , my spellchecker decorates it with a sad squiggle, confirming I've drifted (again) into a topic that's not even in its dictionary. But JI is…
I thought for sure that I’d previously written about the secret jelly packet & pickle-based system that chefs at the Waffle House use to “store” all of the orde
I dedicated over 1,600 days to a data science project, only to see it fail. In this article, I share a new checklist I developed to help prevent similar setbacks in the future.
🗺️ Too many invaders to keep track of; I really don't want to run another database; Web Storage to the rescue
