361
My sourdough starter has twins
A couple of years ago, I participated in a study of the HealthFerm Citizen Science group in …
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 668 posts.
362
The Pragmatic Programmer: 20th Anniversary Edition (2023)
A review of the 20th anniversary edition of The Pragmatic Programmer, updated for modern software development.
363
10 Years of Pomological Watercolors
A decade ago today I published a blog post calling for the US government to release its paintings of fruits. The Pomological Watercolor Collection, as I had recently come to know, is a beautiful and remarkable corpus of over 7,000 pictures of fruits and other biological specimens, made between the 1880s and 1940s…
364
How I Left YouTube
What was the road like when I left?
365
LLM Daydreaming
Proposal & discussion of how default mode networks for LLMs are an example of missing capabilities for search and novelty in contemporary AI systems.
366
Comparing the power consumption of a 30 year old refrigerator to a new one
Having a home server and a few smart plugs leads to interesting data points like this one. Well, interesting to me, at least.
367
368
What I've learned from jj
How Jujutsu's flexibility and safety changed my approach to version control.
369
Ratfactor's illustrated guide to folding fitted sheets
Note to the impatient: You can just scroll down to the drawings of fitted sheets being folded. You won’t hurt my feelings. (I’ll never even know.) But you may want to bookmark this page for later instead. You can get fast at folding fitted sheets. But to learn how to fold fitted sheets is going to take some patience…
370
371
Becoming the person who does the thing
Bad news: your internal identity dictates everything you do. Good news: you can change it
372
500 days of math
I recently crossed 500 days of practicing math daily with Math Academy. I wrote about my experience after 100 days here. TL;DR: I am still very impressed by the Math Academy system and highly…
373
End of an Era
I recall saying to one of my colleagues at Atari way back in 1982 that I wanted to make a game that would be genuine art. A year later I built a game that was my first experiment in that direction: Gossip. It was a ridiculously simple game in which a player attempted to win favor in a group by calling people and…
374
The cultural decline of literary fiction
What happened?
375
Peep Show is the most realistic portrayal of evil I have seen (2020)
Peep Show, a British tv series running from 2003 to 2015, starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb as a pair of miserable, co-dependent roommates living in Croydon, London, is the most realistic por…
376
Matt Trout has died
"No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away,"(Reaper Man, Terry Pratchett) It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Shadowcat co-founder, Matt S. Trout. Matt started Shadowcat Systems with Mark Keating in 2005 after a few years of each of them working for other people's…
377
Everything is Ghibli
When we got “create anything” and all made the same thing
378
Selling Lemons
Personal site of designer Frank Chimero
379
How to increase your surface area for luck
You should just do things
380
Teach, Don't Tell (2013)
This post is about writing technical documentation. More specifically: it's about writing documentation for programming languages and libraries.
381
Cheap DIY solar fence design
A year ago I installed a 4 kilowatt solar fence . I'm revisiting it this Sun Day , to share the design, now that I have prooved it out.
382
The appropriate amount of effort is zero
Most people put too much effort into everything they do. Here’s a good example from Kristijan around tension in his hands when touching and holding things: Something clicked about inhibition and non-doing (in Alexander Technique), and the strongest effect has been a relaxation of my hands. Like I was touching...
383
Short Little Difficult Books
Novels that challenge with style, story, or form that you can read in a day.
384
10k pushups and other silly exercise quests that changed my life
A few thoughts regarding my climb from 0 to 10,000 pushups in less than a year.
385
The value of hitting the HN front page
I’ve been a member of Hacker News (HN) since 2012. You can see my profile here . (Thanks to Jeff Beard for introducing me to it so many years ago.)
386
387
Lightfastness Testing of Colored Pencils
Discover the best and worst coloured pencils and markers for lightfastness, ensuring your artwork stays vibrant and doesn't fade too quickly.
388
More random home lab things I've recently learned
From my series of "Christian's Home Lab adventures", here's some more things I've recently learned / discovered and figured are worth sharing: NVMe SSDs on a Raspberry PI, ARM64 adventures, more zfs troubles, and some cool tools you should try.
389
390
Being good isn't enough
Giving good career advice is hard. Maybe it’s because careers can look more alike than they really are. Two people can have the same title but what helps one...