Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

In fall of 2018, I read a blog post by Dan Luu called "The googlebot monopoloy".

https://danluu.com/googlebot-monopoly/

It's a short blog post that I've probably read a thousand times at this point. He wrote about how websites give Google a big advantage when it comes to web crawling and how that big advantage probably makes it harder for other search engines to compete with Google. This was a pretty striking idea to me and there was a lot of talk at the time about antitrust and Big Tech. Dan's post had been written in 2015, so I was sure that a ton of other people, especially DC policy people, already knew about this and were talking about it. Right?

Turns out, basically nobody in DC knew anything about this. A ton of website operators complain about it on their own forums like HN and SEO, it's not hard to find people griping about the cost of Bing's crawlers, but those people never saw fit to tell anybody in DC about this and how it impacts the market for general purpose search engines and gives Google such an advantage. So I started writing down everything that I was finding about Google's web crawling advantage and writing it in a way that policy people could understand these things called web crawlers they had probably never heard much about before.

And, long story short, the policy people were very grateful that I had gotten in touch and explained all this, and I got cited in the Big Tech Antitrust report published by Congress last summer and then featured in The New York Times:

https://knuckleheads.club/we-crawled-our-way-into-the-big-te...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/technology/how-google-dom...

So, Dan's blog post has had a pretty big impact on my life so far and it's not quite done yet. The pandemic has slowed me down this year much more than it did last year, but I'm working on preparing to submit a paper to an economics journal for peer review that lays out the dynamics of web crawling, why Google accrues this advantage and why it matters. I'm very grateful to Dan for writing that post and, as far as career advice goes, I heartily recommend going back every once in a while and rereading everything he has ever written. Who knows what else he's hiding in there?

Isn’t one of the benefits of presoaking is that it releases certain gases that can wreck havoc on your gastrointestinal system? Does the same thing happen if you use a pressure cooker?

I once had an entire podcast dedicated to sharing blog posts that had influenced my life. I recorded almost 50 episodes, it was a really rewarding experience. You can see the whole list at https://aaronfrancis.com/musicmakers

Joel Spolsky's The Perils of JavaSchools really popped my bubble when I first read it. It was part of a suggested reading list from the Software Engineering MA program I was taking (hidden away on a dark corner of a syllabus). Reading it felt like a refutation of almost everything I knew about software at that point. He introduced to me new topics I had never heard about from my compsci classes like Lisp and SICP.

Reading the post, it became clear to me that it was not about how quick or deep you can learn a language, but rather what are all the ideas and abstractions that enable such a language to exist. Computer science really was more than just computers. After reading that post I looked around and discovered the youtube videos of SICP, which have done more for my love and knowledge of programming than the entire MA program I took.

Link: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java...

Take care with dried legumes, many contain poisonous lectins and they should be soaked overnight first, with the soaking water disposed of and thoroughly rinsed before cooking

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lectin#Dietary_lectin