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Welcome! BoredReading is a fresh way to read high quality articles (updated every hour). Our goal is to curate (with your help) Michelin star quality articles (stuff that's really worth reading). We currently have articles in 0 categories from architecture, history, design, technology, and more. Grab a cup of freshly brewed coffee and start reading. This is the best way to increase your attention span, grow as a person, and get a better understanding of the world (or atleast that's why we built it).

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I'm at RecSys 2014, meeting a lot of people and hanging out at talks. Some of the discussions here was about the filter bubble which prompted me to formalize my own thoughts. I firmly believe that it's the role of a system to respect the user's intent.
over a year ago

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More from Home on Erik Bernhardsson

It's hard to write code for computers, but it's even harder to write code for humans

Writing code for a computer is hard enough. You take something big and fuzzy, some large vague business outcome you want to achive. Then you break it down recursively and think about all the cases until you have clear logical statements a computer can follow.

6 months ago 15 votes
Predicting solar eclipses with Python

As I am en route to see my first total solar eclipse, I was curious how hard it would be to compute eclipses in Python. It turns out, ignoring some minor coordinate system head-banging, I was able to get something half-decent working in a couple of hours.

a year ago 16 votes
Simple sabotage for software

CIA produced a fantastic book during the peak of World War 2 called Simple Sabotage. It laid out various ways for infiltrators to ruin productivity of a company. Some of the advice is timeless, for instance the section about “General interference with Organizations and Production”:

a year ago 14 votes
What I have been working on: Modal

Long story short: I'm working on a super cool tool called Modal. Please check it out — it lets you run things in the cloud without having to think about infrastructure. Scaling out, scheduling, containerization, using GPUs, setting up webhooks, and all kinds of other stuff.

over a year ago 14 votes
We are still early with the cloud: why software development is overdue for a change

This is is in many respects a successor to a blog post I wrote last year about what I want from software infrastructure, but the ideas morphed in my head into something sort of wider.

over a year ago 16 votes

More in technology

20 years of Git. Still weird, still wonderful.

Twenty years ago, Git was born. How did this unlikely "information manager" take over the world?

14 hours ago 3 votes
+ Power users need love too
17 hours ago 3 votes
Traction Heroes Ep. 7: Better Questions

Conversations on the Traction Heroes podcast are proving highly relevant. To wit, episode 7 delves into how the questions we ask ourselves influence our ability to act skillfully. This came up in the context of dealing with uncertainty. Specifically, Harry brought to the conversation the following fragment from Rich Diviney’s book Masters of Uncertainty: To remain grounded in the sphere of what you know and control, cultivate a habit of asking yourself better questions. The brain operates with a question-answer mechanism: it continuously assesses the surroundings with questions and then conjures answers. This typically happens subliminally and instantly, faster than you can notice. You can, however, participate consciously in this process and influence your thoughts and feelings by introducing your own questions. When you introduce a question into conscious thought, the mind is compelled to come up with answers. The problem is that it’s all too common to default to reactive, negative, and sometimes emotion-laden questions such as “Why am I so bad at this?” or “Why can’t I succeed?” Your brain will immediately begin to give you answers to these—yet the answers will not lead to enlightenment. Rather, they will spiral you into further negativity and anxiety. Masters of Uncertainty steer their thoughts with better, more effective questions — questions that center on what they can ascertain and influence. Well aware that knowledge morphs into power, they prime their minds with inquiries like “What do I know? What can I control?” The brain can’t help but answer these questions in ways that put you at the helm. These are the inquiries that empower and hone your focus on traversing uncertainty, not succumbing to it. I hadn’t heard of Masters of Uncertainty before, but I’m reading it and hope to do a book notes post soon. Working with uncertainty is especially relevant now, given the changes rocking global markets. At least part of the secret to navigating turbulence is learning to keep your cool. It’s not a new idea (the Stoics and Buddhists said this centuries ago) but it’s worth revisiting — and internalizing. Traction Heroes ep. 7: Better Questions

23 hours ago 2 votes
A homemade launchpad for compressed air-powered rockets

A conventional model rocket engine is simple combustible solid fuel (black powder or more advanced composites) molded into a cylinder that uses expanding gas to produce thrust. Though it is minimal, there is some danger there. An alternative is compressed gas, which will also expand to produce thrust — just without the explosive chemical reaction. […] The post A homemade launchpad for compressed air-powered rockets appeared first on Arduino Blog.

10 hours ago 2 votes
All the Switch 2 pricing questions I had last week are answered

Last week I wrote 2 main posts in reaction to the Nintendo Switch 2 announcement, and today we have new info on some of the open questions that lingered waaaay back then. Game-key cards I saw a remarkable amount of arguments against this new "physical" purchase option based

8 hours ago 1 votes