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Ask HN: What essay/blogpost do you keep going back to reread?

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Re: Ask HN: What essay/blogpost do you keep going back to reread?

#51
post #6

"This Is Water" speech, by David Wallace. Link: http://www.befreetoday.com.au/this-is-water/

As a counterpoint, see Cushman's comment in this thread about DFW: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2909562 I've reread it probably hundreds of times, it might be the single most insightful HN comment I've ever read.

To anyone who was as confused as I, it is not the linked comment that is what OP is referencing, but a reply.

Re: Ask HN: What essay/blogpost do you keep going back to reread?

#52

This response to someone on StackOverflow asking how to parse HTML with regex: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/145684

I used to love this answer but after I realised that it's same irrational peddling of best practices as "don't-use-goto". There can be many cases where parsing HTML with Regex is abuse, but equally others where it's the best available solution. I wasted countless hours in working with lame HTML libraries, their limited options for selectors, their frustrating failures with invalid HTML, all because of this advice. Lo…

Yes, a thousand times this. First of all, regex in the wild (e.g. Perl regex) is much more powerful than the CS version (that can only handle regular languages). This point is often conceded though from the "don't use regex to parse HTML" side, but some don't realize this.

Another thing is that you don't really need to handle HTML at all, only a small subsection that might be totally fine with a regex, even a simple one, for a lot of cases.

The true enemy is parsing something that might change over time, and that's totally unrelated to the regex issue.

Re: Ask HN: What essay/blogpost do you keep going back to reread?

#54
Meta-question: how do you keep track of these? Every now and then I come upon something and I think "Oh, I should definitely re-read this!". But then, eventually, I end up forgetting about it. Are these just things that often come up and re-read them because you know they're worth it, or do you actively keep track of them somehow?

Re: Ask HN: What essay/blogpost do you keep going back to reread?

#55

Meta-question: how do you keep track of these? Every now and then I come upon something and I think "Oh, I should definitely re-read this!". But then, eventually, I end up forgetting about it. Are these just things that often come up and re-read them because you know they're worth it, or do you actively keep track of them somehow?

Call me old-fashioned, but I just use chrome bookmarks

Re: Ask HN: What essay/blogpost do you keep going back to reread?

#57
Not exactly a blogpost, but this is Randy Pausch's last lecture about achieving your childhood dreams. He was a CS professor at Carnegie Mellon, who passed away roughly a decade ago. I watch it from time to time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

Re: Ask HN: What essay/blogpost do you keep going back to reread?

#58
I want to mention 2 of my all time favorite articles -

1. How language influences emotion - https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/12/the-book-...

2. The Kekule Problem - http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/the-kekul-problem

Both of them very thought provoking and excellent articles.

Re: Ask HN: What essay/blogpost do you keep going back to reread?

#60

Meta-question: how do you keep track of these? Every now and then I come upon something and I think "Oh, I should definitely re-read this!". But then, eventually, I end up forgetting about it. Are these just things that often come up and re-read them because you know they're worth it, or do you actively keep track of them somehow?

I use Pocket, and after going through this thread my feed looks like this :P https://i.imgur.com/DOPpL0Z.png

Though if you start using pocket you will inevitably end up with thousands of unread articles that you will "read later" which might be worse.

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