HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

ahalbert

31 karma · joined September 10, 2013

submissionscomments
ahalbert··on Ask HN: Any Vim users who are sticking with Vim over Neovim?
Inertia, I guess - I'd have to get it set up and all and vim works fine for me now.
ahalbert··on The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century
The author thinks that porn literacy is a good thing, but she notes that it's difficult to teach students to read texts you can't show them.
ahalbert··on Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?
My blog: https://ahalbert.com/

I just got back to public writing, but I like to share summaries of the books I read.

My most recent post is the secret history of cold war submarine espionage: https://ahalbert.com/reviews/2023/07/01/blind_mans_bluff.htm...

This recently was featured on hacker news's front page: https://ahalbert.com/reviews/2023/06/04/the_culture_map.html

ahalbert··on Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage
Yes. I summarize books I read and share what I learned.
ahalbert··on Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage
It's ok. It's quite long and there's a lot of stories.
ahalbert··on Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage
That's what I said in the article.
ahalbert··on Forget Bob Woodward. These Are the Political Books You Want to Read
As far as my favorite poltical biographies go, I think the ones that gave me the most understanding of politics was the Robert A Caro biographies, "The Power Broker" and "The Years of Lyndon Johnson".
ahalbert··on Why write?
I don't know, but I wrote nearly 3000 words on the last book review I did. I'd say I spend less time than 90 minutes per chapter. I'm also sharing the reviews, which I find the most rewarding part.
ahalbert··on Why write?
I do it on my college alum slack channel, but I recently wrote one up that made it to the front page of HN:

https://ahalbert.com/reviews/2023/06/04/the_culture_map.html

I took some inspiration from the book review contests of "Astral Codex Ten"

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-publi...

ahalbert··on Why write?
I recently started writing reviews of each book I read. I found it helps me retain the contents of the book and often people give positive feedback about what they learned from my review.
ahalbert··on The Awk Programming Language, Second Edition
I love using Awk, the only thing I miss is that it can't handle complex csv files. Does anyone know how to handle quoted CSV strings like

> "foo","bar,baz"

ahalbert··on The Biologist Blowing Our Minds
I'm not a biologist, but I know from other biologist that is often difficult to cultivate cells in a lab. Kudos to him for mastering such a difficult art
ahalbert··on OpenOrca: open source dataset and instruct-tuned LLMs
When will the model be available?