Links

Very interesting discussion. Computers' ability to solve tasks goes from 'impossible' to boring as soon as they solve it! Though I am still regularly impressed by GPS...

I’m midway in the philosophizing here, but my point so far is obvious enough: The ability of a machine to do or outdo something humans do is interesting once at most. Deep Blue isn’t playing chess anymore and Watson isn’t on “Jeopardy!” because nobody cares. It doesn’t matter. We humans need to see the human doing it: Willie Mays making the catch that doesn’t look possible. When it comes to art, we need to see a woman or a man struggling with the universal mediocrity that is the natural lot of all of us and somehow out of some mélange of talent, skill, and luck doing the impossible, making something happen that is splendid and moving—or funny, or frightening, or whatever the artist set out to do.

HN thread. I still do not understand the benefit of this

brilliant writeup of excellent technique. And published on the same day he asked about it on twitter!

why am I reading about notetaking tools again

Lovely memorial about his amazing dad.

Great idea

Morning prompts:
What am I grateful for?
What would make today great?
What am I worried about?

Evening prompts:
How am I feeling?
What's something good that happened today?
What did I do well?
What could I have done better?

I love that top comment - similar system to my own, though I do most recent at the top.

Splitting by year is mostly a side effect of getting burned by Vim once when computer lost power. The panic of seeing hundreds of LINES MISSING in my document is not something I want to experience again.

This looks awesome

1. Double down on your best friendships (plural added)
2. Do one thing well and watch it compound
3. An hour of thinking can save you a decade of work

Would like to see more of this kind of write up - description and onboarding experience of a possible alternative to goodreads. Some great explanations in there - account setup, importing CSVs from other places, overview of features.

My (non-expert) opinion is still in favor of fractional dosing. Really needed more non-industry research on it though.

Great read. Super thorough look at economics and other logistics aspects of camming

Cool look at some details of chip foundries, challenges of the tiny scale and clean rooms. Some good diagrams throughout.

Some discussions and interviews on justice by twitter-mob.

By contrast, the modern online public sphere, a place of rapid conclusions, rigid ideological prisms, and arguments of 280 characters, favors neither nuance nor ambiguity. Yet the values of that online sphere have come to dominate many American cultural institutions: universities, newspapers, foundations, museums. Heeding public demands for rapid retribution, they sometimes impose the equivalent of lifetime scarlet letters on people who have not been accused of anything remotely resembling a crime. Instead of courts, they use secretive bureaucracies. Instead of hearing evidence and witnesses, they make judgments behind closed doors.

cooool...

What a wonderful, ridiculous thing

brains are weird. This quote in particular fascinated me:

That seems exciting. I’ve long wondered if in 50 years terms like “emotion” or “reason” will be obsolete. Some future genius will have come up with an integrative paradigm that more accurately captures who we are and how we think.

there is an important distinction between “working hard” and “maximising the number of hours during which one works”. In particular, forcing oneself to work even when one is tired, unmotivated, unprepared, or distracted with other tasks can end up being counterproductive to one’s long-term work productivity, and there is a saturation point beyond which pushing oneself to work even longer will actually reduce the total amount of work you get done in the long run (due to the additional fatigue, loss of motivation, or increasingly urgent need to attend to non-work tasks that this can cause). Generally speaking, it is better to try to arrange a few hours of high-quality working time, when one is motivated, energetic, prepared, and free from distraction, than to try to cram into one’s schedule a large number of hours of low-quality working time when one or more of the above four factors are not present.

Good article, and some other good recs in the comments

Gross and too real.

A history of invasions of Afghanistan. Curious how many aspects we similar over time, the persistent impact of geography as that hasn't changed much over the last 2000years. We describe hundreds of years as some era under the rule of X, but consider that's more than your entire life! And for mountains no significant amount of time has passed

This post made me feel like an amateur. I have only 3, relatively small book piles.

Animation rendered from photos taken by Cassini spacecraft

The 100+ starting point really put things into perspective for me..

Added to watchlist

I don't know if I am as blown away as Alex but this is very cool. Like machine pair programming with text.

Most of the content is right there in the title, but I found this one pretty motivating.

Rostam goes through the creation and production of a few songs. Some wonderfully specific parts, like when he included effects in the recording of a sample, or the attempt to find something completely different to an existing sound to add to a song.

When I quit smoking 17 years ago, a wise doctor counselled me that if I was going to resist cravings, I needed a more immediate reason than "I won't get cancer in 40 years." My answer: "I spend two laptops per year on a product whose makers want to murder me and my friends."

Thanks Alexandria \U0001F49C

How different you and your brain behave in times of extreme emotion. Makes people bad at empathising with others ("I would never do that.."), and bad at predicting or understanding their own behaviour.

History of his website redesigns. There was a more recent one since, but this post is more detailed.

Fantastic post, and website generally. Read a few more of his posts, had a bit of an explore around. A lot of good "this is my website, I can do what I want" bits in there.

Very useful set of tips for things to avoid in technical explanations. Pick your audience!

Inspiring example of someone apparently just building all their own tools. The notes on browser as the place thinking happens is good - I mostly keep text notes on things and lists of links. Might look into those tools a bit, or try Memex again.

In general, pornography use trended downward over the pandemic, for both men and women. Problematic pornography use trended downward for men and remained low and unchanged in women. Collectively, these results suggest that many fears about pornography use during pandemic-related lockdowns were largely not supported by available data.

The mysterious and meteoric rise in obesity since the late 70s. Part 2 includes a reference to The Australian Paradox

Can't exactly remember where I found this, but some interesting looking publications on sound and music

The review alone was very well written, quite excited for the book

Some good bits around how using past information can backfire. Either overfitting if looking too far back, or spending too much effort on predictions.

Enough effort goes into an initial forecast that updating your views when new information becomes available can trigger the sunk-cost fallacy and cause you to be right or wrong for the wrong reason.

His projects website is coooool. So many awesome things.

Another great project from Lynn Fisher. All the best movies-in-movies in one place

Great writeup on the many challenges posed by adding doors to a game. Also quite amazing seeing how much people can do with Unreal without having to type code.

Generational loss of a concept! Growing up mostly with phones means less understanding of file/folder structure. Either the OS deliberately tries to hide it from you (mobile OSs grouping files by type), or on computers where people mostly use Downloads folder and Desktop.

Short story, inspired by a GitHub thread about semicolons.

Some great design notes, making things with game design in mind (i.e. "make the next action obvious"), rather than just going for goddamn slot machine mechanics.

via Amelia

I'm not, but good set of questions for decision-making anyway

Always interesting, and very clever. Talks about upcoming technology (real and expected), cultural and institutional changes, government as buyer to incentivise development, a bunch on companies and employees.

Mostly sensible looking predictions, interesting set of topcs: Enterprise software, phone form factor, SF / NYC tech rivalry apparently, Crypto as dissident tech, fall of grad school, biotech bubble, microplastics health fears, campaign growth hacking, and SV startup scam.

Great, scary photograph. More than the boats I noticed previous high water mark on the riverbanks.

From Vox explainer of Ready Player One

Original title was "Why Captcha Pictures Are So Unbearably Depressing", which felt a bit complainy compared to the updated one. I agreed less with that take on the article, but a lot with the sentiment from the HN comments

A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it's not somewhere I feel welcome.

So many good points. Tasks vs notes; not everything needs a checklist, some things are just notes. Thinking "I'll do that later" is a lot easier than "I will select a date/time in a calendar popup to schedule a reminder for this task". Todo apps are ineffective if having them is more work than the task you are trying to do!

A quote on HN about procrastination has also made be add Red Dwraf to booklist.

Notes from an interview over dinner at Mama Chang

A bunch of good and/or relatable bits in comments section of this. Some sounds far too intense (the guy's ex-wife needing him to reply to messages within minutes!), some interesting ones on how people use their phones, and how beaviours and norms toward them have changed.

And from another interesting reply:

even if you ignore addiction , mobile phones have been integrated into society in so many infrastructure-like roles that they are hardly at all optional or 'ignorable' at this point.
When you live in a world that requires bills to be paid via mobile, rent to be paid via mobile, mass transit tickets bought via mobile, physical location reservation via mobile, as well as any customer service only available via mobile... who cares about personal addiction; normal life isn't feasible without a mobile phone at that point, and very few (if any at all) mobile phones are designed from the premise that they should respect your attention.

The mobile phones that are designed to preserve the users attention are widely incompatible with any functions that the user needs (billpay/specific group apps, whatever) to stay integrated with the systems being forced upon them, so those options are already non-starter.

That means this problem is worth discussing -- non-compulsive normal people as well as compulsive addicts are being affected by the lack of 'respect for attention' that mobile phones have, and this problem intersects with the 'required prevalence' of mobile phones across the world.

I love that when not teaching, blogging, reading, or conducting in-depth and detailed interviews, he manages to find the time to maintain a food blog.

donoteat01's hyperloop take still has me very skeptical on tunnels as a viable transport alternative.

Excellent writeup. The CORS example dot points are a great example of good clear security explanations.

From 2019!

Not something that came up much in reviews for these (some did mention the weight). But has really been ruinous for comfort so far

Some terrifying terms in there. Universe 25 seemed ominous enough, but the 'Beautiful Ones' - the mice that just dedicated their lives entirely to grooming - is like something from a movie.

Thoroughly enjoyable listen.

Was great hearing the earlier/wip versions of things (also related to him being a data hoarder! Though he's done much better at it than me), and going through the various iterations, both good and terrible, seeing what works together and just that process of experimenting.

Really just hearing someone talk about their passion. Him realising that he really enjoyed messing around in garageband, making joke songs and jingles. Sometimes just saying random words to get the sound of something.

Excellent take. The imagined overly critical audience is a jerk.

“True karate is about competing with yourself, not with other people,” agrees Da Luz of the Okinawa Karate Information Center. This also makes it a lifetime practice

I probably want to try Perry's perceptual knot (from the comments) since it's adjustable. Don't trust this "tie once, never adjust" shoelaces.

Internet archive didn't save all the images for the steps, so after just skimming these are all still pretty unclear to me.

From a comment on the fastest shoelace knot thread

Summary of recent Sci-Hub legal challenges

I really wonder how this is going to play out. For those who don't follow the current situation with Sci-Hub, Alexandra (the creator and likely the sole operator) of Sci-Hub shut down the part of the website ("the magical proxy") that is responsible for fetching the papers that were not previously retrieved. This was done to comply with the request of the Indian court, as described in the article.
As a result, any papers published in 2021 (and some of the rarer, older ones, that nobody tried to access in the past) are not retrievable by Sci-Hub. The user only gets to see a white screen.

This is meant to be a temporary measure, but it's been going on since December of last year (due to various court hearing delays), and the desperation in online communities like the r/scihub subreddit has been palpable [1,2].

This is the kind of thing where you think "oh sure that would be a neat side project" but the reality is an immense amount of effort

I liked Uri Bram's comment on this: "A PDF, but well worth the inconvenience".

Recommended by some random HN commenter

Interesting analysis on immigration, unemployment, language, housing, and economy of Spain. Who writes like this after a vacation?!

Overall, my visit has made me more optimistic about Spain. Much of the measured unemployment is illusory, and immigrants are pouring in to profit from Spain’s combination of high productivity and linguistic accessibility. Housing policy remains bad. Since housing regulation is decentralized, however, some regions of Spain will be atypically tolerant of new construction. Where is the Texas of Spain? I don’t know, but that’s where the future is.

Reading this made me feel a little more justified in my general distrust of browser extensions. They have so much potential power!

Some of these are getting quite outrageous. But I do love the level of depth and detail of this.

Phenomenal website. The color choice, the layout, the color and type selector in the header! All amazing stuff.

Can't remember who linked to this. Was in some article about CSS, author linked to Miriam and said she was doing great work.

They found that some reusable alternatives never manage to reach that break-even point because of the energy and water used each time a reusable item is washed.
...
On the positive side of the ledger for reusables, nine of the 12 reusables were able to reach the break-even point, even when washed after every use.

I am probably still mad about all the straws hype.

For example, reusable bamboo drinking straws and two reusable sandwich storage options — beeswax wrap and silicone bags — never reached the break-even point in any of the three environmental impact categories assessed in the study: energy use, global warming potential, and water consumption.

Aiming for 60% global vaccination rate by next March. Some interesting facts and notes around which countries produce/export vaccines.

Pending peer review, but apparently large benefit in waiting 12 weeks rather than three.

In donors without evidence of previous infection the peak antibody response was 3.5-fold higher in donors who had undergone delayed interval vaccination. Cellular immune responses were 3.6-fold lower.

The word 'metaverse' is starting to get grossly overused and lose meaning.

Any mention of FB is inevitably pretty devisive on HN.

"Share a private virtual room with friends. Watch videos, play with 3D objects, or just hang out"

Works impressively well on pancake browsers as well. Found via HN.

A long-awaited product - laptop with upgradable parts! And decent specs! The internal adapters might be too late (USB-C is almost now widely used enough), but at least having the choice of ports is cool.

Some interesting thoughts on writing and communication, and a brief technical dive into emoji encoding and display.

Variations on tomato farming

Some incredible options and truly upsetting designs

tldr: exposure time is too short, so the stars are very faint

A newer CSS Zen Garden. It's great.

I hate so many aspects of recent reddit, it somehow continues to get worse.

It’s shocking to me how people sell out like this. You have to know deep down that all these hostile short term juicers destroy the brand, each malfeasance creating more room for a competitor. I mean you guys replaced Digg, cmon.
The audacity to claim “it works”, in italics no less.

The real shame of the current tech companies is they have no principles, no long term vision. They all feel like they follow the same curve, a bunch of managers hitting KPIs during their 2-5 year stint before trading up, ending in some PE firm diving in at the end for the final squeeze.

They’re lemons being juiced dry, when they should be a garden of lemon trees.

“But we got 20% more juice than last year!!”

Yea, you did.

From hackernews.

GitLab security scanning has a similar issue of false positives (many Node security vulns in frontend-only code). But at least they can be marked as resolved!

Awesome to watch. Goes quickly from looking doable to looking ridiculous. After all the landscape detail the man & dog are basically a footnote

some good playlists in the comments

I feel this one. Was just going through some old unread email newsletters (some from 2019!..), and linkrot is made even worse by the tracking links in emails. Tracking / shortened links are just another potential failure point!

Covers a lot! Approximate cost breakdowns, on people's desire for customisation, on transport costs of materials (you can't ship prefab concrete slabs across the country).

Includes a handy one-liner on why things aren't improving:

The combination of consumer tastes, low dollar value per volume building components, and the complexity of buildings inhibit efforts to scale.

Suggests coming up with a range of estimates (best/worst case), include assumptions, refine later

Either infuriating or upsetting how long we have known about this and done nothing.

HN discussion, including some good comments like this:

The time for decisive action was at least a decade ago, but there's no harm in starting now — it just means that the transition to alternative energy sources must be more abrupt and more investment must be allocated to remedial technologies that can work towards undoing at least some portion of the damage we have done to our biosphere.

Let historians and the next generations worry about whose fault it was. It is more important to secure for the next generation a sustainable and habitable future, than it is to look back at past hubris and wonder where it went wrong.

A counter to the "but I always use cmd R" argument. Stripping away useful UI so things look clean is not a good design approach.

Awesome concept. And a nice disclaimer on context menu:

Some loose-ish estimates, but some staggering figures in there.

16% of the world bought 70% of the vaccines. What force on earth could stop them? None, so we needed the massive supply increases, which were effectively banned.

What fraction of all vaccines were wasted?

• by excessive dosing. No sign of the dosing regimes changing despite strong evidence. 50-75%?**
• by bad needle design. 10-30% more.

Also includes some good links and references. And honest disclaimer from the author:

Note: I'm not a engineer, I'm not an economist, I'm not a pharmacologist, I'm not an epidemiologist. There will be something wrong with the above, no doubt in misunderstanding the nature of vaccine engineering bottlenecks.

Though I don't think I ever worked as hard as the commentor, this bit felt pretty relatable:

One thing that always happened at the end of a semester is we'd have a few days after exams but before flights back home. On these days I'd typically try playing a video game (my hobby before college) and every time I would stop playing after just an hour with deep feeling of unease at the pit of my stomach. "Alarm bells" is exactly how I would describe it - a feeling at the core of my psyche that I have been wasting time and there must be something productive I should be doing or thinking about.

Years later, having tackled anxiety problems that had plagued me most of my life, I came to recognize that my relationship with hard work during my college years was not healthy and that this deep seated desire to do more work is not a positive thing, at least not for me.

Tool for the lost art of tagging your audio files

Generally agree. Mainly tracking file creation/history gets a bit annoying (especially when files are moved/renamed/split up). But most of the time I don't think it particularly matters.

Also some good tips like ingorerevs in hackernews comments.

Some complaints about the lack of obvious scrollable areas.

And HN discussion with some more.

Stumbled across this after reading some posts on his excellent main site, which I've seen on HN a bunch of times.

I’m starting to grow tired of the term Project
Today online everything seems to be a project. It’s become an umbrella term for anything, from artworks to app development, from business endeavours to, well, writing fiction.

Cool idea! Unfortunately doesn't have web app

The forward march of Apple stripping away UI elements continues. Some quite bad tab-related ideas in there, and an excellent point on tab grouping:

A little experiment: how many browser tabs do you have currently open? Let’s be conservative. Let’s say nine. How many are so tightly related among one another that you can meaningfully group them together? I bet none to very few.

If I am working on something with a bunch of related tabs, I am more likely to have a dedicated browser, or user, or session with those. I don't want to juggle and maintain tab groups to deal with their agressive UI culling.

Great summary of the deluge of tools being made (from 2015!). But with a positive take at the end:

Instead of telling people to stop creating new js frameworks. Instead of discouraging people from adding to the vast amount of available tools, I'm going to encourage people to build even more tools. Pick a problem and try to solve it better than anyone else has before. Having better tools will help us push the web forward. And it's okay if 90% of them are bad. The 10% will be worth it.

Maybe unsurprising, still disappointing

Cool write up, some interesting points:

• operational transforms are complicated (mainly used for text collab)
• last value written to server wins
• ignore incoming changes from server while writing, to avoid flicker
• fractional indexing for reordering
• for undo, if things were changed (by someone else), that history is updated to prevent conflicts with redo

An insanely sensible idea! Some choice quotes in the intro illustrate the problem (and a common one with git..):

Git is a version control system with robust underlying principles, and yet, novice users are terrified of it. When they make a mistake, many would rather delete and re-clone the repository than try to fix it.

Why? How is it so easy to “lose” your data in a system that’s supposed to never lose your data?

Well, it’s not that it’s too easy to lose your data — but rather, that it’s too difficult to recover it.

HN is amazing sometimes. Top reply is:

I am an IP litigator, and I have dealt with patent trolls repeatedly. I have taken these kinds of cases pro bono in the past for small companies

Beautiful landing/demo page for a variable font.

this made him more relatable than anything else I've ever heard from him.

To check a bitly link, add + to the end of the URL.

Some gems in replies

Just incredible. Browser-based photoshop

Add to list the list of things ruined by crypto miners. So much for "crypto is an energy arbitrage". Taking advantage of free services and wrecking them for everyone else.

I like that I have a "trees" tag in links now.

Great way to find new books - specific curated lists.

Good one for the crypto proponents bringing up "oh well the internet seemed useless early on as well".

Is there any requirement for them to be sticky?

Also see web.dev

Via Soroush's twitter

Holy shit this is crazy. Rendering for VR is surprisingly different to rendering to a screen - mainly the "check current pose to figure out what to render" part is wild.

Paper from 2018(!). tldr: no, it isn't.

Notes on how Vanilla Extract does what it does.

Overview of a century of breakthroughs and other improvements to health and longevity. The many small changes that stack up to reduce mortality.

The stats I've seen on this tracking toggle are pretty wild. Will be interesting to see how the next period unfolds for advertisers. If history is any guide they'll get even shadier and look for terrible workarounds, but we can dream.

Two key parts: start small and play slow!

Treating practice different to performance. Until you can actually play a piece just do drills, then gradually build up to larger sections. But do the drills slowly and correctly, rather than trying to play at actual speed with bad form.

This is why so many form fields yell at me while I am typing in them!

Sensible writeup. The trashing and attacks over gd frameworks is terrible and unnecessary. Use whatever tech you want!

We crush and burn rock, and then re-constitute it at a time and place and in a form of our choosing.

? Like coffee or pancake mix, it's “instant stone—just add water!”

Isn't that basically magic?

Longer form on Instant stone - just add water.

I love the question "what's a boring topic that you're excited/fascinated by". Great way to learn new things!

Quotes from this piece on Ethereum.

I hold zero real gold, so why would I need digital gold, especially digital gold that is ridiculously expensive to transfer?

Started off sounding so ambitious and friendly; the goals and incentives probably shifted fairly early.

They never delivered on this "strong goal" to make web search an academic endeavour.

supply and demand is one special case which comprises a fraction of the total pressure on wages and prices and success or failure at any moment.

Mostly about case and formatting consistency. Fantastic list, these sorts of things don't exist often enough.

The structure of the article is great - "here's the whole thing, followed by a line-by-line breakdown".

The enormous blobs of mobile meta will always be a bit gross.

Some amazing sounding experiences

Don't know if they have a real product yet, but exciting to see meat alternatives other than beef!

Cutting sync support for Chromium was what finally sent me to other browsers. Now alternating between Firefox, Brave, and Vivaldi.

Good advice - be genuinely curious about things rather than an NVC parrot

Interesting stuff. I have no real background in this but still found the article and experiment outline very readable.

Random find, fantastic write up. Kind of a year in review, kind of a work/life/other reflection. Summary of the clusterfuck of a year, reasons for leaving the US, thoughts on finding where to move to. Some parts on work and projects.

Manages to be personal without feeling like oversharing.

Some good tips for better writing. HN thread on it also had some interesting points on tone and editorialising of writing.

Outlines reasoning behind Capsize. Still haven't looked much into this but some sensible ideas in there.

Article raises a lot of the things I don't like about tourism: locals being priced out, areas being ruined and overrun by visitors, and useful stores being replaced by junkshops selling shitty trinkets.

Subtitle explains it - America’s biggest vulnerability in cyberwarfare is hubris. Shoting "this is 'murica" doesn't protect your data.

Cool glitchy animated drawings in the article.

Hadn't tried this opening before and quite enjoyed playing it. Made for an interesting game

I love this for many reasons. Mostly for some people continuing with approaches that aren't just brute force deep neural nets. Goes into better detail than the original headline, which implied it could just automatically detect cancer cells (it was years of work going from pastry detector to other uses). Hard things are hard.

Excellent tips, and good pictures explaining what they mean (this is often overlooked in descriptions of actions). Sit forward, sit up. Leg angle closer to 120 that 90 is a good one

This is a joke, but some parts are too real

you forgot to mention the time it takes hunting for your 'obscure teenage years' CDs on eBay, setting up search alerts for each CD to appear for ~$1 with cheap shipping, waiting three weeks for them to arrive from Lithuania, alcohol-rubbing the dozen sale stickers off the jewel case, cleaning the CDs with lint-free holy water, ripping the audio losslessly at superfast 52x, physically scanning with a scanner and optimizing the album artwork, categorizing, metadata'ing, updating and maintaining your Frankenstein music database, updating the online database for prospective fake internet points, and relisting each CD at $2

yay science

This is beautiful. Also little bit of history in the replies - this is apparently a public kitchen shared by multiple people, who would then eat in their own rooms.

Wonderful web app to generate much nicer looking shadows than I can come up with

Random discovery from some article, verified on Wikipedia. A few decades in the timber business, then in the late 90's started buying fashion companies. Now owns Gucci, YSL, Balenciaga, Brioni, Girard-Perregaux. Businesses are crazy.

The relaxing sound of events and errors rolling in to your server.

I too have a lot of issues with this. What if your file moves? What if the file is fake? What if URLs change? What if servers shut down? Startups shut down or disappear all the time. And even if they don't people don't tend to do backwards compatibility anymore. This is a whole new and expensive consequence to link rot.

Short version:

The NFT token you bought either points to a URL on the internet, or an IPFS hash. In most circumstances it references an IPFS gateway on the internet run by the startup you bought the NFT from.

Oh, and that URL is not the media. That URL is a JSON metadata file

What a champion. I was quite worried my laptop was dying.

I still have no idea what is going on with all this.

What’s interesting is that Beeple, the creator of the artwork, is actually a business partner of Metakovan’s. He owns 2% of all the B20 tokens. I’m sure there is no conflict of interest here

NFTs as a recruitment tactic for some non-nerd advocates of crypto. The "what is digital ownership" section is legit - being digital and "on the blockchain" doesn't make things magically last forever. Many parts of it could disappear.

4. A few artists really are making life-changing money from this!
5. You probably won’t be one of them.

This aspect isn't particularly different from Spotify and similar.

Linked from John Cochrane conversation with Tyler.

I respect their dedication to a joke idea

Not sure tihs is actually everything I needed to know and I still have many questions. Good historical overview of the rise of them though.

I wish this was longer. I had left the tab open and unread for ages thinking it was a big commitment but it's a few minutes only. The question of "how do we prevent accidental activation?" is an interesting one.

Ambitious thing to estimate - I don't even try to predict a week ahead!

Some things to get excited about:

• mRNA tech
• geothermal power
• in-orbit manufacturing of things that cannot exist on Earth(!)

On how movies of the last decade or two fetishise the body but tend to lack nudity or sex scenes.

HN thread has some interesting theories, I am partial to the censorship for easier marketing in China one.

Fantastic interview on her background and reasons she had wanted to tell the story

Not sure I agree with all the conclusions, but the summary history of reddit and some possibilities is interesting.

I don't have strong opinion on it one way or the other. But I think we can all agree that exploitative game mechanics do suck.

Twitter thread that apparently motivated the removal.

Mobile games that aren't full of ads, slot-machine mechanics, or micropayments

oh wow I saved this link years ago and only just realised you can click to interact with the animation!!

Great overview of some nice looking parts of Go. May actually convince me to look!

this requirement reads like the whole thing was made for a specific cat picture

It works best with 299 x 299px images that depict one specific object.

Currently at $3.7M

This is cooool. I've been into eye-tracking since seeing a talk on it a couple of years ago. Had figured any kind of accuracy needed more than just visual pupil tracking so this being even remotely accurate is neat.

This was a pretty solid list. Mostly simple & sensible.

Link appears to have sadly already suffered linkrot, need to start backing these things up.

Good list to re-read and remember. Be more considerate of where the years go. Also learn how to come up with phrases like this :)

Don't agree with all the points, but would enjoy less third-party tracking. Especially if it means fewer fucking cookie notifications.

Good year to do this I guess. It definitely does need to be easier, that is probably a matter of keeping notes for "here are places I need to update when I change this key".

Very relevant to recent events. Stupid political divides give people too many reasons to not listen to each other. Finding relatable and shared ways to get the point across is more effective than just being clever.

Good notes on levels of feedback. Read something similar to this (tldr don't tell people they need to rewrite if they are showing you a final draft!). Partly saved because I like the site design.

Fuck unnecessary acronyms

Haven't seen this Q&A thing before - it's kinda cool.

Dense, short summary of GC in Ruby. Relevant to work bookclub book

Takes on this have been infuriating. From the 'oh my their definition of news is too broad' to the 'biLliOnaIreS wANt 2 ceNSoR uS!!!' calls from people who should fucking know better.

I really do rather hate the news. Particularly all this recent extortion horseshit for paying to have users post links.

Excellent episode. Need to relisten and write a summary

Some good reading. Still mixed feelings on half the posts being gemini-only since I don't have a supporting browser on my phone.

I think this also. We have the means to solve so many pressing problems but choose not to do so.

We possess the resources and production necessary to provide every human being on Earth with a comfortable living: adequate food, housing, health, and happiness. We have decided not to do so. We have achieved what one may consider the single unifying goal of the entire history of humanity: we have eliminated natural scarcity for our basic resources. We have done this, and we choose to deny our fellow humans their basic needs, in the cruel pursuit of profit. We have more empty homes than we have homeless people. America alone throws away enough food to feed the entire world population. And we choose to let our peers die of hunger and exposure.

Don't agree with all (I like some of the stupid new features), but the core point is true. Web browsers have gotten too complex and are basically no longer rebuildable from scratch.

Tips on stair placement, making things visible in levels, and some room/layout tricks to make stairs actually useful rather than min-length ramps between areas of different heights.

Just turned on a YouTube kids video for my 2yr old and it was the story of 10 anthropomorphized donuts who are screaming as they’re baked in the oven, banging on the glass, cooked alive. Then each one drowns face down in a different color icing.

I would actually watch this. Understandable that parents might not want a two year old to though..

The design philosophy behind flash was to let you make animations and interactive content.

The design philosophy behind html/css/js/web stack is a composable system of modules that can be bundled, used to center objects, and plumb state to components.

Qualtiy write-up of the process behind making The Emperor's New Groove (great movie).

Cool idea. Causes some wild screen tearing or something on old laptop, and as the author mentions:

while it might look great, usability of it is poor

Linked video on motion blur is also good.

Drive a train, forever, through a dreamlike land.
Transport passengers to their destination.
Watch the world go by.
Listen to chilled out chiptune music.

A beautiful, amazing thing.

The shift from being online being the fun part of your day to it being the core part of the day. Not only makes it feel more like work, but makes the other online aspects feel more work-like.

Sorry for rushing this a bit, but got home yet?

Really great and approachable tips for communicating with cartoons.

HN Thread also has some good links to books and sites

Need more content like this. "How to do sensible things with HTML" is under-explored compared to how to do stupid things with JS

Super interview. Talks about books, birds, poetry, and spies, Lots of interesting and random tidbits in there

I agree and kinda hate this boring trend

Web component library. Worth looking into at some point

Might try this out for some project organisation. Reluctant to use this for all notetaking due to editor lock-in - I can't use VSCode on this low-RAM laptop.

Thorough and followable breakdown, with lots of code comments. Will this be what gets me to actually learn WebGL? We'll find out!

Good write up - actually providing some counter arguments other than "your markup is ugly". I'm still very undecided on tailwind, and comprehensive util class libs generally. Some sense, easy to go overboard with the "one rule per class" nonsense.

Love the language in this post. "Ceviche is a different matter."

Useful clip for heavy bird-like walk animationo

Love the layered demonstration

All gold

Some good tips on ensuring things other than work happen.

Don’t be that person. Don’t jump on issues making demands. Don’t pile on forum threads that make some users’ opinions very clear as it is, and throw your bellicose howling in there too. Don’t insult the developers or their priorities, their choices. They are real people who have a finite capacity for work and for abuse. Add a thumbs up to an issue, add a heart to a forum request. Post only if you can materially add to the discussion, else use a reaction. Post in the spirit and the letter of the community guidelines.

Please be nice.

Always wonder how many of these early Amazon stories are survivorship bias, but they sure are good at going all in on plans

Great little explainers for some important concepts. Learned a lot from /proc one!

TLDR: make a study plan and crunch for a month

Some good resources for free sheet music and other resources for learning music. On the actual site I saw the 'have Amazon print it for $9.53 paperback bound book', which is an interesting concept.

More on chip foundries! I am still curious to see if China or the EU's giant investments into chip manufacturing manage to catch up, or for how long Taiwan can maintain their lead.

Comments start with a neat post from JT Nimoy on designing realistic hacker interfaces for Tron Legacy

Longer growing seasons, larger areas of workable land, and parts becoming more hospitable at the same time other regions of the world become uninhabitable due to heat.

This is cooooooooool. Control tabs from the commandline! Search them like searching files! Amazing idea.

Found my first contributions to Zero-K! Was looking for commits but this predated the git repo

tldr: anything! Can use them to build up strings for other variables, combine values with calc (I want to implement color-contrast function), and clever use of content to display the current value!

A bit of history of typesetting and text rendering

Mind-boggling stats on solar and batteries. I did not know that we probably reached peak greenhouse emissions in 2019!

Good writeup of the scary phenomenon of getting people to people batshit insane conspiracy theories. "Don't trust experts. Do your own research. Here's some facebook posts to get you started".

Examples of proper and appropriate use of adjectives

Auto-delete as a default is good - the permenance of random new services is always worrying.

A lot of programmers get to that second 90%, get tired and bored and frustrated, and change jobs, or lose focus, or find excuses to procrastinate. There are a million ways not to finish a project, but there’s only one way to finish: Put your head down and grind it out until it’s done. Do that, and I promise you the programming world will be yours.

More greatness from Xerox PARC in the 90s - principles around keeping technology out of the way.

I would like to learn about chip foundries. No idea how that stuff gets made.

I like the point that film music can't be overly specific - if it's too emotive in a particular way then it can overpower the film. The music should add something to a scene, but it shouldn't determine how people are going to react to it.

I actually started using Anki a little after this (installed it and set up some decks at least). Haven't stuck with it yet but we'll see

Honest subtitle would read "International statement calling on tech companies to ensure end-to-end encryption is not implemented".

Apparently end-to-end encryption has a "severe impact on public safety".

Cool project, writeups and resources for a wide range of computer-related topics. Ambitious idea, and another way of illustrating how many damn things we are meant to know. Still very WIP, but structure and content is good so far.

amazement in under 1kb

More people should write these

Yet another thing that came from ancient Rome

Interesting bit on translating sign language at a standup show (for a kid!), trying to choose appropriate tone & sign choice.

Strongly agree with this. Some choice pieces:

Aggressively popularized “best practices” often have a tendency of manifesting cargo cults around them, enticing developers to apply design patterns or use specific approaches without giving them a much needed second thought

Naming tests in accordance to specifications rather than classes has an additional advantage of removing that unnecessary coupling. Now, if we decide to rename SolarCalculator to something else or move it to a different directory, the test names won’t need to be updated to reflect that.

To summarize, we can conclude that it’s a good idea to partition tests based on threads of behavior, rather than the code’s internal structure.

The "write your code so it's easy to test" idea is silly. Write your code so it's easy to read. Test speed should barely be a consideration for your 200 line side project. Cypress tests are easy to read and actually test that stuff works. Test speed does become a factor eventyally, but worry about it then, rather than upfront.

All too relatable. I have been struggling with this for years

Amazing write up, and clever outcome. Waist-level pockets are indeed stupid or poorly design most of the time, The reach/support diagram is a good illustration of the problem space

Great writeup, and fun to go through the questions and explanations. I really went off the rails with grep and parsing estimates, others were mostly solvable.

HN Discussion has people alternately arguing about whether modern programs are fast, or bloated and slow.

I don't think Moore's Law is an excuse to not worry about program performance, and the current slew of slow apps (web and otherwise) is not acceptable. Many electron apps really do feel slow. Waiting for my password manager to open (either electron app or chrome extension) is frustrating. It's minor, but it's friction to something that needs to be frictionless.

That isn't to say that can't be made fast. VSCode is a good example - that uses electron but has remainined very performant. They got boot up time down real low (actually relevant for me as I open/close sessions often). BUt on my older laptop (4gb RAM) I can't have it open alongside browser, so mostly use editors in the terminal. It does still mostly work, but they have focused on perf speed rather than footprint. Still some tradeoffs to be made there, and again another hard thing to think about.

There are definite costs to the abstractions, but also benefits. But none of this is free. Perf is hard, and computers being faster doesn't mean we don't have to think about it - time has been unchanged. Only our expectations have (of features and speed).

2 hours saving 10 seconds per file open twice a day is an egregious violation of the xkcd rule, but it was fun and I learned a lot about Vim automation in the process.

AND saved me 2 hours as I simply found this on google

it was more of a synthesis, one idea leading to another and then another

I think a lot of things are developed in that way, but people still love the inventor/flash-of-inspiration narrative

Most of it hinges on this:

I don’t foresee enough people paying for niche newsletters for this model to be feasible.

I don't know enough to have an opinion on this. People are quite cheap with written content, in particular for niche publications vs a newspaper/journal that publishes across a range. But there are also a lot of people on the internet, so who knows.

Good explanations & debugging tips in there, and entrypoint: [""] was the solution I needed!

I didn't know about pre/post for all scripts in npm!

git-annex warrants another look.

Instead, you should try to blend together the needed disciplines as best you can, consulting others when necessary, an offer the best plan you can, namely the best plan all things considered.

That might fill you with horror, but please recall from Tetlock that usually the generalists are the best predictors.

Very readable, similar to super tiny compiler

Salaries for different levels of job for a bunch of companies

I really like the original one, and this is a solid reply

Lot of good parts

The high performance parts aren’t React. Mapbox GL, for example, is vanilla JavaScript and probably should be forever. The level of abstraction that React works on is too high, and the cost of using React - in payload, parse time, and so on - is too much for any company to include it as part of an SDK. Same with the Observable runtime, the juicy center of that product: it’s very performance-intensive and would barely benefit from a port.

The less interactive parts don’t benefit much from React. Listing pages, static pages, blogs - these things are increasingly built in React, but the benefits they accrue are extremely narrow. A lot of the optimizations we’re deploying to speed up these things, things like bundle splitting, server-side rendering, and prerendering, are triangulating what we had before the rise of React.

Amazing collection of large numbers and small languages

This is joy

todo

That squares with my experience of software development. It's like being a furniture maker but spending 80% of your time fixing your goddamn hammer because it keeps breaking and no better hammers exist, or consulting glue-drying tables because they keep changing your glue on you every hour or two and for no good reason every single glue performs differently while accomplishing the same thing.

Ive noticed some people use github almost like a social network. A rough analogy to Twitter would be that starring a repo is similar to liking a tweet, and forking it is almost like a retweet.

Love this term - this is exactly how I learn. Start by skipping over the details,
develop a coarse understanding, then refine your knowledge by learning about specific areas in more detail.

It is a long lesson that I am still not through, will see if it can live up to the bold claim of its title

source

Many helpful perspectives

Great way to learn things, and to make exactly the thing you want.

HN discussion

The Show HN for this has some alternate great tools for similar things

Interesting estimates and numbers - clientside savings really add up.

In fact, it is probably the most effective use of my time when it comes to reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
Just last week I reduced global emissions by an estimated 59.000 kg CO2 per month by removing a 20 kB JavaScript
dependency in Mailchimp for WordPress. There’s no way I can have that kind of effect in other areas of my life.

Highlights:

• People exhibit overconfidence in their ability to calculate exponential growth
• People exhibit overconfidence in their ability to use a spreadsheet
• The results suggest insufficient demand for help and tools

Continuing on why touchscreens are a shitty interface, especially for vehicles

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

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

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

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!

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

More negative knock-on effects from decades of demonizing fat

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

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

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

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

Day-to-day negative effects of pollution on indiviudals

Using an external harddrive interferes with wireless keyboard and mouse

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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 :(

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

Dammit snap where are my files

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

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.

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

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

I particularly like the interlude:

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

Keep pages simple and self-contained

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

Amazing thread

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

Fantastic explanation

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

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

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

I have been obsessed with rsync lately

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

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

Also remember to take damn breaks

Novel concept to visualise audio samples

Yet another vim alternative to try

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.

Combo of talk + write-up below is excellent

How to do what vim plugins do with just vim

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

This is glorious

TLDR use cmd < file, not cat file | cmd

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

Explanation and practical uses of defaults in macos

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

The best way to practice is to spend time thinking

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Cloud-to-butt but for all bullshit buzzwords

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

Nicely written piece, and great website

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Solid advice on reading, annotating, and selecting

how to make better use of commute or dead time

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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