Top all-time · #22787
Rahim Nathwani
Personal blog · encona.com/posts · on HN as rahimnathwaniprogrammingeconomics
Rahim Nathwani's personal blog at encona.com covers programming and economics. Since 2017, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 22 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-31, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
The only comment says the site appears to be down, so it says nothing about the writing. The thread it came from is about advertising.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Rahim Nathwani's personal site: education, AI in practice, tools, and probability.
What Hacker News says?
If you export a deck as an .apkg file, you can unzip it to get the SQLite files: https://www.encona.com/posts/custom-statistics-for-anki-flas...
Comment linking /posts/custom-statistics-for-anki-flashcard-reviews
on “Spaced repetition systems have gotten better”Submitted Central Bank Digital Currencies: A common misunderstanding as a story · 3 points
HN discussionOfftopic: The website in your profile http://encona.com/ seems to be down.
Comment linking /
on “Insane state of today's advertising part 3”Submitted Custom statistics for Anki flashcard reviews as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI found it both amusing and annoying that the first line of the article mentions VLOOKUP. In my experience, there's never a good reason to use VLOOKUP. You can always achieve the same functionality using INDEX (in conjunction with MATCH). Using VLOOKUP means that your formulae break as soon as someone inserts a new column in the middle of your table. And clicking the cell with the formula doesn't immediately show yo…
Comment linking /posts/excel-best-practices
on “The New York Times course to teach its reporters data skills is now open-source”Submitted How to Learn Chinese as a story · 2 points
HN discussionPerhaps my explanation will help? In your chart of accounts, each account corresponds to exactly one of these: - Asset - Liability - Equity (changes in this affect the income statement) Whenever a transaction takes place, the debits and credits must sum up. For example, when you take a bank loan, your assets increase (debit) but your liabilities also increase (credit) by the same amount. Sometimes something touches…
Comment linking /posts/debits-and-credits
on “Learn accounting for free”Submitted Monty Hall Problem as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis is a nice write-up, and it's great that it includes instructions for things like creating a GitLab account, which may be unfamiliar for non-developers. But if you're going to maintain a blog as a set of markdown files, it'a worth considering using Netlify CMS (a web-based CMS for managing markdown files in a git repo). This is especially the case if you don't use a command line or git often, e.g. if you're not…
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on “Host Your Own Blog with Gitlab and Netlify”Submitted College Textbook Scams as a story · 1 points
HN discussion"but aren't almost all currencies already digital?" Nope. Individuals cannot own digital dollars. I have dollars in my checking account, but these aren't real dollars. If I have $100 in my checking account, this means Schwab owes me $100. It doesn't mean that I have $100. It doesn't even mean Schwab has $100. https://www.encona.com/posts/central-bank-digital-currencies...
Comment linking /posts/central-bank-digital-currencies-misunderstanding
on “The digital currencies that matter”Submitted Converting a server-rendered Python app into a single page Progressive Web App as a story · 1 points
HN discussionMy personal blog: https://www.encona.com/ Built using: - gatsby (static site generator) - netlify CMS (git-based headless CMS) - GitHub (git remote for netlify) It was dead easy to set this up, as someone had already done the work: https://github.com/alxshelepenok/gatsby-starter-lumen I tried to set up something similar from scratch myself, using Strapi as the CMS, but I found myself re-inventing too many wheels (e.…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What stack is your personal blog built on?”Submitted Persistent State in Vue/Svelte NativeScript Apps as a story · 1 points
HN discussion"but it does mean teachers should pay close attention to price to help rebalance the market" This misses the point. These folks aren't ignorant, and often they're complicit, because the publisher uses some of the excess profits to provide services to the tutor (homework admin and (auto-)grading). I wrote about this here: https://www.encona.com/posts/college-textbook-scams
Comment linking /posts/college-textbook-scams
on “Why the textbook marketplace is fundamentally broken”Great idea! Note: some of the information you linked is out of date, e.g. the linked summary says 'You have to sort the LookupLabels by name for match to work'. But MATCH() takes a third optional argument (match type) which, if set to 0, means you don't need to pre-sort your Lookup labels, and you have no risk of having an approximate match returned. I wrote a short blog post with the Excel advice I most commonly gi…
Comment linking /posts/excel-best-practices
on “Show HN: Secrets of Mastering Excel”Some book and topic suggestions here: https://www.encona.com/posts/product-manager-resources/
Comment linking /posts/product-manager-resources/
on “Ask HN: Resources to learn to become a product manager?”A list I put together a while back: https://www.encona.com/posts/product-manager-resources Overview books: * Inspired * The Product Manager’s Desk Reference * The Lean Startup * Agile Product Management with Scrum Interview preparation (good for breadth, even if you’re not applying for jobs): * Decode & Conquer * Cracking the PM interview Other good books for PMs: * Hooked * The Design of Everyday Things * Zero to O…
Comment linking /posts/product-manager-resources
on “Getting started in product management? Any recommended books?”If you use Anki and want to analyze your review history, you can export the review history into a CSV, and then use pandas to analyze it. https://www.encona.com/posts/custom-statistics-for-anki-flas...
Comment linking /posts/custom-statistics-for-anki-flashcard-reviews
on “I did 301,432 flashcard reviews in 2025”'Debit' only means 'the left hand side', and 'credit' only means 'the right hand side'. Not only, and not even! The terms debit and credit have meaning independent of their columnar position on a traditional ledger. I could create a ledger with the columns reverse or (shocking!) use a computer program with a data structure that doesn't encode the concept of left or right. I think about it like this: CR / Credit / Cr…
Comment linking /posts/debits-and-credits
on “Accounting for Computer Scientists”The fundamentals of accounting (in particular double-entry bookkeeping) are simple, but they're often presented or understood as a series of unconnected facts that must be memorized. It doesn't have to be this way! Start with this identity: Equity = Assets - Liabilities This is self-evident: the owners of the company have a claim on the company's assets, but only after any liabilities (like debts to other companies)…
Comment linking /posts/debits-and-credits
on “Accounting for Computer Scientists”I like this explanation. Another equivalent one that I wrote about a while back[0]: You can choose to have: - The most valuable prize that’s behind door A, or - The most valuable prize that’s behind doors B or C When you look at it this way, it’s obvious that you would rather have the most valuable prize from the ‘other’ doors, and the way to do that is to switch. [0] https://www.encona.com/posts/monty-hall-problem
Comment linking /posts/monty-hall-problem
on “Tricking Monty Hall”