Examples of productivity porn include but are not limited to: reading a tweet by a top VC about how to become a better startup founder; watching a Youtube video about the 7 mistakes you need to avoid at the gym; perusing a Hacker News thread about how to improve the code you write.

I've abstained from most social media but do still consume hackernews. A small portion of articles I read involves in productivity tips (like this one). I do not know how effective most of them are, but I don't think they're completely counterproductive. One of the most life-changing practice is time-blocking, which I also learned on hacker news. Over the years the time time-blocking afforded me is enormous.

So in my opinion, it's not always a bad thing to learn about these. Sometimes I need to know about, or at least need an affirmation on a better way to do things. And adjust myself for that, because otherwise it's no different from reading a junk novel.

Also, no need to befoul of pornography. They're a lot more useful and productive than social media!

Fun Fact: the sensation of "needing to breathe" is you sensing the acidity in your blood rise due to the increased CO2 concentration.

That’s also how the shallow water blackout happens. Because it’s the oxygen that keeps you conscious, but the CO2 that makes you breathe, and they might get out of sync. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freediving_blackout#Shallow_water_blackout

Oversimplified:

1. The period of x mod N, x2 mod N, x3 mod N, x4 mod N, … sequence can reveal the factors of the product of two prime numbers.
2. The period is very difficult to find for large numbers.
3. Quantum Fourier Transform enables the extraction the period in a fast way. (the only part that quantum mechanics involved and I still can't understand how)

because Microsoft was threatening to sue all the Linux vendors shipping Windows 95-like desktops.

In the end MS did not sue anyone... but it got what it wanted: total chaos in the Linux desktop world.

I never knew about this part of history. This probably contributed to the amount of hate M$ get from the community.

The interpretation in this article may not be true. See more discussion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32257412.

You have a ~0.0005% chance to hit the Sun. If you don't hit that your chance to hit a star at any point in the future is well below 0.000000001%, most of that coming from the first ~1000 light years. If you don't hit anything in that region the chance decreases even more.

Here's another way to see this. In about 4 billion years, the Milky Way and Andromeda will collide and form a new galaxy. They predict no stars will collide with each other during the event

Note that there are billions of billions of galaxies all over the place, and each has billions of stars, and yet the chance to hit one of them is abysmally miniscule. This explains how big the space is.

You could harden a Linux server by killing the init process. That would cause a kernel panic, and prevent new processes running (e.g. shells). Existing processes like Web servers would continue to function, so you could put this at the end of the boot script :)

I never thought that is possible! Kind of stupidily funny and brilliant at the same time.

Or, how to specify different git config (name, email, sign key) for projects under different directories.

1) Show what made you care
2) Show, then tell
3) Therefore & But, not And Then
4) Write a draft, cut 10%
5) Do real tests, early & often

A short summary on the method:

1. construct an infinite sequence of numbers [f(0), f'(0), f''(0), ...] to represent a function f (note the the boundary conditions are specified directly)
2. the sequence can constructd by self-reference (e.g. y = y'), compsition (+, -, negate, *, diff), analytic function composition (g f = g fa :> g' f * f', for log, exp, trig)
3. By Taylor expansion, f(a+x) = sum(f[k] * x^k / k!), this allows us to evaluate f at any x.

A discussion about unconventional data structures and algorithms.

I had a lot of fun browsing through this Wikipedia entry!

A diversity of paper airplanes categorized! I felt like looking back to my childhood.

A great introduction article on homotopy type theory! I've been learning HoTT recently, and this article explained it really well.

Also read: https://www.science4all.org/article/homotopy-type-theory/

There are stars all over the place!

A collection of miniature programming languages which demonstrates various concepts and techniques used in programming language design and implementation.

TL;DR: they are converging to sans-serif font mostly for simplification and readability purpose.

An interactive demo on how ants follow simple rules to find near-optimal solutions to feeding and fighting problems.

The author claims the pretention to acquiration twitter is just Elon's joke. Elon's unusal habit is to pretend to acquire something and he has several antecedence before. It's an expensive joke to make but he can afford it as the world's richest person.

Un-paywalled: https://archive.ph/5nLiC#selection-3951.7-3955.102

the Dunning-Kruger effect has nothing to do with human psychology.1 It is a statistical artifact — a stunning example of autocorrelation.

A comment on hackernews summarized it well:

If you want to do great work, you need freedom first.