Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 5,820 posts.

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4481

Why Read Classic Books?

This is my first attempt to “think out loud” about the question I get most often: why bother reading the Classics? This is still very much a work in progress: I think people don’t consider and adapt their own beliefs often enough (see also: mental liquidity ). I consider my opinions here to be very much loosely held…

4490

Watermelons

This week we nerd out on watermelons (available May to October). All living beings on Earth constantly search for water—tree roots grow into cracked or leaky underground pipes to access the water they carry, camels can go a full week without drinking thanks to the unique water-storage capacity of their oval-shaped red…

4496

How to exfiltrate code from Bitbucket

Every year or so, something compels me to start over with a fresh OS image. Most recently, that something was an unfortunate water bottle incident. Once again, I need to pull down my digital life from the internet. The code and assets for this blog currently live in a 500 MB Git repository, which was hosted on…