Links

Explorable Explanations

Interactive examples to learn through reading and play. I looked at a music one and it was one of the best visualisations of notes/harmony I've seen

Here’s What a Googol-to-One Gear Ratio Looks Like

Stylus : Broken links to install Chrome extension : Hacker News

I was looking for stylus when this was posted! The danger of letting corps gatekeep your application is that it can disappear

The Ultimate Digital Clean-Up Checklist

Went through a few of these in December and was pretty great. Unsubscribing from services/lists, and deleting a bunch of notification mails.

When I joined the tech industry in my early 20s and for years after, I noticed t... : Hacker News

I noticed this as well. Went from wanting to code all the time, to wanting to do something not web related in spare time. Hobbies are important!

How to read self-help

The Business Innovation of Star Trek

Constrain the infinite vastness of space to the bridge of a single ship

You Will Never Be A Full Stack Developer

The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake

Demystifying post-GFC economics; the problem with scarcity; interest rates; long political cycles; and the end of history

The problem with economic model of scarcity. More savings does not mean more spending - people eventually have enough cash and enough things; at this point they are taking more money out of the economy than putting back in.

Absurdly, comically simple is the way to go

I love this, and have experienced it first hand too many times. But a single text file has worked well for me, and saved.

Stepping Feet Illusion : Hacker News

Few other interesting ones in comments. I am terrified of the McCollough effect

However, Jones and Holding (1975) found that 15 minutes of induction, when time-elapse testing is employed, can lead to an effect lasting up to 2.8 months

Do u even DIY, bro?

A look at the music industry. You can't make money from album sales, or from touring. Either have to do it as a hobby or get into the merchandice game.

The limits of high speed rail

A walk through how fast different types of train can go, and why. Great balance of history and physics, detailed but without too much assumed knowledge.

Game AI Pro

All three volumes of Game AI Pro available online! For free!

A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers

A wonderful, horrifying read. This makes me feel better about all the terrible things I've ever done on computers

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Message to Young People: “Learn to Be Alone,” Enjoy Solitude

The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

Tablet multi-tasking is awful, and inconsistent. The form factor has potential, but it hasn't made much use of it yet

Pork for a Change?

More negative knock-on effects from decades of demonizing fat

Free Audio Books : Download Great Books for Free : Hacker News

Some great suggestions - assessing quality of free stuff is always tricky (esp audio), so a high-level filter is a good start

Against History

Reasons not to study the history of philosophy. Greek/Roman writings are not sacred texts!

Home ownership is the West’s biggest economic-policy mistake

We continue to encourage an outmoded mode of home ownership, and incentivize buying in spite of no economic argument

Reverse engineering course : Hacker News

Course is WIP, chapters are all very short but shows promise. Some good other links to courses and material in HN thread

Pollution · Patrick Collison

Day-to-day negative effects of pollution on indiviudals

The Case Against Huawei

Plastic Pollution

USB 3.0* Radio Frequency Interference on 2.4 GHz Devices

Using an external harddrive interferes with wireless keyboard and mouse

Goodbye, Clean Code

DRY code is not always better code. Duplication is often better than shitty abstractions

Reality has a surprising amount of detail

RTL Styling 101

I was hoping for a way to minimize margin left/right overrides, but sadly not. Bunch of other issues that come up with Arabic text - underlines, letter-spacing, opacity, font-weight, and others

Software disenchantment

watching/waiting for node deps to install almost causes me physical pain

You don’t have to be a genius to write fast programs. There’s no magic trick. The only thing required is not building on top of a huge pile of crap that modern toolchain is

False Humility Will Not Save the Planet

We need solutions that are less terrible for the environment, but 'living in harmony with nature' is basically a fallacy; seeking that is longing for an age that never existed.

Stupid Unix Tricks 11 October 2019

Excellent tips. Reading this makes me feel like my security is atrocious

Key practices for achieving large professional goals

I had this exact same paper day schedule! Not exactly a groundbreaking discovery, but the half-hour blocks and height of the page are both great limitations

Electron is flash for the desktop

Users: Please complain more about slow programs. Its 2016. We carry supercomputers in our pockets. Its simply not ok for apps to be sluggish.

It is no longer 2016, but nothing else in this piece has changed :(

How to Section Your HTML

Ask HN: What niche blogs are worthwhile to follow?

Good place to look for things to read. Going to try scheduled redirect from Twitter to this page and see if I end up wasting more or less time

Managing Ubuntu Snaps: the stuff no one tells you

Dammit snap where are my files

The End of WordPress Themes is in Sight

This is less drastic than I thought. With more block editing, themes will be used for styling, but no longer for layout

Ask HN: Full-on machine learning for 2020, what are the best resources?

Honestly, skip all of the courses. Pick a problem to solve, start googling for common models that are used to solve the problem, then go on github, find code that solves that problem or a similar one

There is mixed consensus on this. But copy-pasting snippets to solve my problems is how I've learned to program so far; why should ML be any different.

Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

Interesting activity to try. I feel like I would google may more than this

Why JavaScript Tooling Sucks

Voidcall: 13kb RTS game in WebGL

Tell HN: 500 unread mails, 2K unread articles, 5K unread posts – I am drowning

This made me feel better both for the suggestions, and because I had nowhere near as many. TLDR just delete most stuff as it doesn't actually matter

Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors

I particularly like the interlude:

no, you can't randomly cite 2,000-page-long books and hope nobody will read them

How to Create the Apple Fifth Avenue Cube in WebGL

A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web

Keep pages simple and self-contained

Hammerspoon – macOS automation with Lua : Hacker News

CBT In The Water Supply

Effect of the spread of information from fringe to broad adoption to "everyone knows this"

Amy “Ruins Social Media” Hoy on Twitter

Amazing thread

The Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniquies for the Online Search Interface

Paper from 1989(!) looking at different methods people use to find information. There are six main categories, most online search continues to only use one or two

Why is JavaScript not compiled to bytecode before sending over the network?

This is normal part 1: what normal maps are and how they work

Fantastic explanation

What Happened To 90s Environmentalism?

Welcome to Airspace

More local example of homogenous diversity. At larger scale all cities start to look the same as well

Tradeoffs: The Currency of Decision Making

Bash best practices

This is SO helpful. Have had this page open as a reference for writing and fixing scripts, and started using Bash Boilerplate a bit as well

Finally getting somewhere

Static v. dynamic languages

nbdev: use Jupyter Notebooks for everything

Bitcoin, 11-years in

Kill sticky headers

Snigbo's ImageMagick pages

I Like To Build Things That Way

Feltron.com

New York’s Subway Map Like You’ve Never Seen It Before

French Artist Paul Sougy’s Stunning Mid-Century Scientific Illustrations of Plants, Animals, and the Human Body

Kotlin Playground: Edit, Run, Share Kotlin Code Online

Recipes for Performance Testing Single Page Applications in WebPageTest

WebReplay

The Four Tools of Discipline

Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Constantly Changing World

Brunello Cucinelli

Why I Never Use Shallow Rendering

LisaDziuba/Awesome-Design-Tools

What Are Design Tokens?

Love this. Doesn't need to be stored as JSON either, can convert from whatever and generate

A cron job that could save you from a ransomware attack

I have been obsessed with rsync lately

Group Chat: The Best Way to Totally Stress Out Your Team

The Tools are Here

How to do hard things

Identifying what specificially the hard things are, then adjusting the task to add/remove difficulty

CSS{ In Real Life }

Minimal Viable Programs - Joe Armstrong - Erlang and other stuff

First 90 days with Syncthing

Zombie Miles And Napa Weekends: How A Week With Chauffeurs Showed The Major

Very clever approach to estimating impact of self-driving cars. Interesting that budget limited a lot of the scope. Since this should be pretty important, but also that saving money is going to be a benefit of this!

Small sample size + novelty surely impacted the effect of a driver. Also that they can get out of the car and do stuff, whereas doing groceries or drycleaning you'd still need human intervention

Preventing Injury: 8 Best Hand and Wrist Exercises for Computer Users

Also remember to take damn breaks

SteamVR/Frame Timing - Valve Developer Community

Leapfrogging the IDE

XO - XLN Audio

Novel concept to visualise audio samples

Building from Source · Onivim 2 User Manual

Yet another vim alternative to try

Reducing activation energy for writing

Copied verbatim because I love this:

1. Observe the world, pay attention to things.
2. Jot down snippets of observations/ideas in a single Google Docs document (available on almost any platform). Don't try to organize it. Keep it really simple. The key is to keep it low effort and frictionless.
3. Look over the Google Docs document from time to time. When you have enough ideas coalescing in a cluster/theme, feel them out. When the cluster feels like it's ready i.e. you feel an emotional connection to it, start writing. Important tip: don't feel you have to finish writing in one sitting -- you can stop, let your writing sit, and keep re-clustering until you have something that is worth putting out there.

The World-Wide Work. — Ethan Marcotte

Combo of talk + write-up below is excellent

no_plugins/no_plugins.vim at master · changemewtf/no_plugins

How to do what vim plugins do with just vim

Dynamic SVG Animation with CSS Variables

I like the sidebar underlines and main page heaxagon anims on this

code.talks 2019 - 20 Terrible Ways to Reverse a String

This is glorious

Beware the Metagame

One more lane will fix it...

Useless use of cat - Wikipedia

TLDR use cmd < file, not cat file | cmd

A Guide to Getting Unstuck

Removing and purging files from git history

Wanted to remove a bunch of old/unused binary files that were bloating a repo.

Change macOS user preferences via command line

Explanation and practical uses of defaults in macos

macos - How to enable/disable grayscale mode in Accessibility via Terminal

Useful to have a script/clickable thing for this as I toggle it on/off frequently

Location, Privilege and Performant Websites

Chaos Design: Before the robots take our jobs, can we please get them to help us do some good work?

Phenomenonly written and researched, with amazing demos and ideas throughout. Multi-themed components being visible in dev is a wonderful idea

Scott Galloway on Twitter: "#GrubHub earnings...plus my thoughts on UberMoney

What Is Zombie Simpsons? | Dead Homer Society

Text Editing Hates You Too

The Whitewashing of “#WhitePeopleDoingYoga” – Mother Jones

Finding my People — Stephanie Hurlburt

Not everyone’s going to be my people, or each other’s people. No one in any group large enough is going to like everyone, or even be neutral to everyone— there’s gonna be some “get away from me” and strong dislike floating around, there are going to be divides. Pleasing every single person means being close to no one.

An Illustrated Guide to Useful Command Line Tools | Hacker News

Some additional useful bits in comments (also a lot of 'just use x'). Actual list has some gems in it: repgrep, podman, mdcat etc

Memex: Browser Extension to full-text search your browsing history and bookmarks

This looks very useful. Full-text search and some other convenient integrations

Free for developers

Massive list of tools and SaaSes, some free, some with free quotas listed.

Excavating AI

Digging through the history of biases and problems with training data and categories used for ML tasks

Hard to watch Twitter become less useful, valuable, and interesting with new ad insertion ratios

Interesting post/thread.

Insert more ads. Signal to noise goes down. Value to user shrinks. Value of user to advertisers decreases. Insert more ads. A vicious cycle that de-prioritizes the user experience.

How a Decision Journal Changed the Way I make Decisions (with example)

Good strategy to minimize hindsight bias and try to improve quality of decisions. Interesting point from some interview: good decisions that have bad outcomes (due to chance) are better than bad decisions with good outcomes, as the latter reinforces bad decisions.

Learning How to Think: The Skill No One Taught You

The best way to practice is to spend time thinking

The First 1940s Coders Were Women – So How Did Tech Bros Take Over?

Parse .env file on command line

.env files were the thing that made me stop pasting credentials directly in my WIP files.

Using DevTools Features Without Opening DevTools

How to Resample a Drum Break Accurately in Bitwig

Still trying to figure out the UI and layout of Bitwig, finding these kind of focused tutorials worth it for navigation alone

My Favourite Git Commit

Refreshingly professional. My usual favourite commits are either Developers Swearing or awful puns.

Coffee is Hard

The ludicrous complexity of everyday activities is never as obvious as when you ary to add it to a game.

Design Bias is Ruining Accessibility

Accessibility won't work as an afterthought, it needs to be part of the process.
Making sites accessible makes them better for all users. Real-life example of this is curb-ramps.

The Hot Potato Process

Great pushback on the one-way design -> developer handover that often happens.

I've had some great pairing sessions with designers over video calls this year. I am curious to try using recordings to bridge time gaps.

Bullshit.js | Hacker News

Cloud-to-butt but for all bullshit buzzwords

I find journaling indispensable

HN thread has some other interesting ideas/templates for daily docs

Journaling :: Up and to the Right

Nicely written piece, and great website

Caring about tomorrow

Why haven’t we stopped climate change? We’re not wired to empathize with our descendants. Artificial distance that we add to 'other people'

Don't Ruin Readability for Performance

Possible counterpoint: if the text doesn't render due to slow perf then readability is also affected.

Though only comparisons of text-rendering: optimizeSpeed; vs optimizeLegibility are from a while ago, unsure
if this is still a legit perf issue anyway.

Smoother & sharper shadows with layered box-shadows

Brittany Chiang | Software Engineer

Some nice animations and flourishes. Source project includes color palette!

Why I Write - DESK Magazine

From the author of "Love letter to my website", using writing to organise the mess inside your brain

WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

As it turns out, the S-1 was correct; Neumann was pivotal to WeWork, because WeWork only exists due to his ability to get money from investors.

Climate Denial

Personal triggers are more persuasive that any other arguments or data. Future and far away people are harder to imagine than seeing change in a place you know. Image from ShowYourStripes is striking.

Ask HN: How Do You Read?

Solid advice on reading, annotating, and selecting

Consume less, create more

how to make better use of commute or dead time

This Ain’t Disney: A practical guide to CSS transitions and animations

Optics Illustrations from the Physics Textbooks of Amédée Guillemin (1868/1

Software 2.0 - Andrej Karpathy - Medium

Writing HTML in HTML

Ask HN: How do you stay disciplined in the long run?

How to manipulate CSS colors with JavaScript

GPT-2 As Step Toward General Intelligence | Slate Star Codex

Our Increasingly Fascist Public Discourse

Seeking the Productive Life: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure—Ste

Sometimes I think "I am a huge nerd". Then I read things like this and feel either normal or inadequate.

Celebrated Writers on the Creative Benefits of Keeping a Diary

Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

Stats on editors/content for reddit, Amazon, and Wikipedia

Designing an audio adblocker for radio and podcasts

Soon after Adblock Radio gained some traction in 2016, I have received lawyer threats from French radio networks (more details below). I had to partially shut the website down, change its architecture, better understand the legal ramifications, etc

The Wavefunction Collapse Algorithm explained very clearly | Robert Heaton

A blogging style guide | Robert Heaton

Some solid rules for writing better. A lot of structure, a bit on content, and some process suggestions

I Used The Web For A Day Using A Screen Reader

Tips from and case studies of using a few websites with a screenreader. TLDR make your markup valid and lightweight, keep headings in correct order, and add assistive tags.

The art of working in public

How to write about things you are working on without giving away secrets or spoilers

The Algorithmic Trap — David Perell

The worldwide sameness that results from everyone chasing the same internet aesthetic, and impact on tourist experiences.

Depending on algorithms, however, doesn’t work as well in cities, where culture is more important than geography

Recursivity: Columnists go ga-ga over Reagan letter that demonstrates what a tool he was