Whenever I post something publicly on Facebook mentioning hacking I get a ton of spammy comments:

There was recently some discussion on how many minutes callers typically run a contra dance, with a lot of "well, it depends" answers. There's a place for that, but I think it's also helpful to have some numbers. I went back over the last ten evenings where I have recordings:

It looks like 8-9min is pretty common. How much variability is there within an evening?

Let's say you use a Google account as the root of your online identity: Gmail, Fi, "Sign in with Google", Google's password manager, etc. How much should you be worried that you'll suddenly find yourself unable to get into everything? Should you do something else instead?

To get a sense of how common lockouts are and how they happen I looked through lockout reports on Hacker News by searching for [google blocked account] and [google locked out]. I looked at top-level stories and the comments on them for cases where people were entirely locked out of an account; I didn't include cases where people lost access to only some Google services (Payments, AdWords, etc) or where they did get back in on their own. I did count cases where it took making a lot of noise on HN or Twitter, though.

There are two reasons people seem to get locked out:

In 2013 I built a weird feature where clicking on "◂◂ RSS" at the top of a post gets you an RSS feed that runs in reverse from that post, with a 'new' old post with the publication of each new new post. It's a bit hard to think about, and reminds me of trying to keep tenses straight when time traveling.

I was reminded of it today when someone submitted the post to HN, so I calculated some stats:

Truffles are pretty great: gooey fat-softened flavored chocolate inside, protected by a shell of hard chocolate so you don't get your fingers messy. Sometimes I'll make them with the kids:

This is a good amount of work: you need to prepare the filling, chill, shape little spheres, chill, and then dip them. Worth it for making presents or sharing, but not if I'm making something for myself. Instead I just make a jar of ganache:

How old is the effective altruism movement? It depends when you count from, and it's hard to pick any specific day or event because it coalesced out of a lot of different strands. Plus, since this is a movement and not just an idea, it matters when it started gathering people which is naturally very fuzzy. Roughly, I'd describe the progression as something like:

At the beginning of 2008 there wasn't an EA movement yet, while by 2012 there was one. There wasn't an instantaneous change.

Why this particular curve? Here are some historical points that anchor it to events: