Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 382 posts.

Life, Learning & Writing
364

Tickling (2018)

Before our kids learned to talk, I would play tickles with them. I would make tickling gestures as I moved towards them, they would start giggling a little, then I would tickle them and they would laugh. We'd continue until they seemed to be done with the game, and then we'd move on to something else. As they got…

366

Hexagonal Cross Stitch

At least year’s Bridges Conference in Stockholm, I attended a short presentation by Susan Goldstine about “self-diagramming lace” . As motivation for the new work she was presenting, Susan referenced her paper from the year before on what she calls “symmetry samplers” . Samplers are an old tradition in fibre arts. A…

382

Gell-Mann Amnesia

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so…