Tagged “hn”

HN thread

Great response with some voice-powered code/automation things.

Relatedly, the killer case is summarization.

Sales is a lot like golf. You can make it so complicated as to be
impossible or you can simply walk up and hit the ball

Changes to carpark design guidance published here - chargers, fire safety, and weight increases.

the average vehicle’s weight has increased from 1.5 metric tons in 1974 to nearly 2 metric tons in 2023.

related to the big car loophole

very HN that first reply is "work on open-source software"

Solid first comment, too

On an emotional level, I think it's better to start from a place of (unconditional!) self-love, and go from there, rather than beating yourself up because you're not meeting some blogger's expectations of how you should act.

look after your health

Convinced me to start using xfce timer, and it has already been useful!

Seeing more of these GitHub-as-a-blog.

HN thread

More resources on HN thread for Vector Databases: A Technical Primer (PDF).

And SimonW on embeddings.

and relatable HN thread

the four hobbies:

doing the thing	getting gear for the thing
talking about the thing	talking about gear for the thing

Some of these experiences sound terrifying.

Modal seems like a winner.

Within a week it was cloned and put up on a nice domain
with a different logo and the copycat was impersonating
me on social media and ranking quite well on Google.
It's no longer open source.

interesting comments from some Alphabet employees - that cost of LLMs needs to come down by 10x-100x to be viable.

Some variations, on the challenges of identifying speakers, noise, voice recognition (lot of people using Whisper now).
On perfect memory preventing you from escaping the past - getting caught up reliving things.

A random selection:

• not all life-changing advice is good advice
• An estimate is better than a guess. An measurement is better than an estimate.
• It's never the money. (They will always say it is, but it's not.)
• The best time to turn it on is before it's ready. You'll get plenty of data to finish it faster.
• Your positive mental attitude makes up for most of your shortcomings.
• Isolate. Isolate. Isolate.
• If it's not written down, it's not.
• The reason everyone we work for sucks is because those who don't suck never call us.
• Almost anyone can do almost anything.
• Always take sides

Explain text from papers or answer questions. Cool way to fill in gaps on unfamiliar topics.

From show HN

Lots on parenting and time. On choices to have kids, on free time, life satisfaction, population growth, ageing, and bunch of other random jumbles of life advice.

Less interested in the mouse input that useful vim tips in HN

things to make you feel better about your own codebase

The dataset used to build krea.ai.
Also discussion of Lexica.
Finding and learning prompts continues to be a whole thing.

avoid reading the short little articles and threads on improving things. Instead, do the thing.

Good thread, too.

When map and terrain disagree, believe terrain

asker is 23!

As they all move to suggested posts and farther away from being networks people use for social.

What should we call the replacements?

Rate-limit everything, absolutely everything.

Cool having googlers just pop in to the comments to explain/counter people's observations. Most of my useful google search tricks were from some article I read a decade or more ago with some inurl: and file format tricks

Still mixed feelings on DALL-E, the book is good though. Useful some well-explained concepts.

from hn.

Still unsure on the particular zone/diet hype. The "Power 9" from the NIH publication was interesting though:

1. Move naturally. Live in environments that constantly nudge them into moving without thinking about it.
2. Purpose. Ikigai/plan de vida/"why I wake up in the morning."
3. Routines to shed stress
4. 80% Rule. Hara hachi bu — stop eating when stomach is 80% full. People in the Blue Zones eat their smallest meal by early evening then no more for the rest of the day
5. Plant slant. Beans, including fava, black, soy, and lentils, are the cornerstone of most centenarian diets. Meat — mostly pork—is eaten on average only 5 times per month. Serving sizes are 3 to 4 oz, about the size of a deck of cards.
6. Moderate drinkers outlive nondrinkers. The trick is to drink 1 to 2 glasses per day, with friends and/or with food.
7. Belong. 258 of 263 centenarians interviewed belonged to some faith-based community. Denomination does not seem to matter. Research shows 4 to 14 years of life expectancy increase from weekly faith attendance!
8. Loved ones first
9. Right tribe. Okinawans created moais — groups of 5 friends that committed to each other for life. Smoking, obesity, happiness, and even loneliness are contagious. Social networks of long-lived people have favorably shaped their health behaviors.

Still curious about it

Check back on his blog in a year

Some suggestions:

• read more
• read slower, understand better
• write in books, apparently. I am still unconvinced

hosting from home is still a bit of a worry, curious what attack vectors are like when running server on android.

1. Is that sandboxed?
2. Do regular linux exploits work?
3. Could you just use wifi hotspots to keep them local?
4. Battery swell issue. Use acc or battery charge limit. Both require root

via hn

Has changed my writing; been doing this and writing much shorter sentences.

Other tips on hn

I like the idea, kinda agree with "this cheat sheet is likely to be come your weakest link in your security threat model" - where should you keep it?!

via hn

Mentioned in Don't be that open source user

More links and suggestions in comments

Some good work/life balance suggestions and options in the comments

Some good advice on finding ways of enjoying work or life or both, and being wary of taking advice from entrepreneurs - they've gambled and won.

Some interesting discussion in hn comments on sabbaticals and breaks from work.

Saved for if Google kills Scholar

Can relate to this. Avoiding ads most of the time I find TV ads very jarring

Incredible project

Twitter thread on the design of the iPhone 7 lens.

in the past 5 years or so, advancements in phone cameras have come mostly in better sensors, far better image processing, and adding more cameras

Article is crazy. 96 books! Text file is still working ok for me

My suggestions:

• Animation Survival Guide
• Drawing in pen instead of pencil (commit to lines!)
• Character Art School on Udemy has been good

Thread features some good discussion on the "I've been doing it for decades and still learning" as encouraging or not.

Recommendations:

• Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
• https://drawabox.com/
• Youtube. There is a higher level of skill in art then at any point in history and you have access to it.

In those days, my head was full of reggae. Even when I was trying to come up with a rock beat, I think it just naturally came out as something that would work in reggae as well.”

From the rare HN discussion filled with music recommendations!

Some interesting comments on the novelty aspect, routine, familiarity, perception of time

Perfectionism is more often about being afraid to be bad at things

A far more elaborate setup than I am ready to look into at this time

Via HN

I don't know what to make of this insanity

maybe a thing to try out this year

He has written more reviews than I have read books this year..

Article does kinda go on a bit of a nostalgia trip. I still manage to take plenty of shit photos

Good book rec in the comments for Susan Sontag’s “On Photography”

Some bits on retirement and people figuring out what they want to do.

I wish people would only use this for good. A stupid arms race that just makes it harder to automatically download utility bills.

cool idea. I'd like a fork of this with todos as well, so you can have daily dos and dont's.

interesting discussion on experiences and stats of apps

HN thread. I still do not understand the benefit of this

Original title was "Why Captcha Pictures Are So Unbearably Depressing", which felt a bit complainy compared to the updated one. I agreed less with that take on the article, but a lot with the sentiment from the HN comments

A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it's not somewhere I feel welcome.

So many good points. Tasks vs notes; not everything needs a checklist, some things are just notes. Thinking "I'll do that later" is a lot easier than "I will select a date/time in a calendar popup to schedule a reminder for this task". Todo apps are ineffective if having them is more work than the task you are trying to do!

A quote on HN about procrastination has also made be add Red Dwraf to booklist.

A bunch of good and/or relatable bits in comments section of this. Some sounds far too intense (the guy's ex-wife needing him to reply to messages within minutes!), some interesting ones on how people use their phones, and how beaviours and norms toward them have changed.

And from another interesting reply:

even if you ignore addiction , mobile phones have been integrated into society in so many infrastructure-like roles that they are hardly at all optional or 'ignorable' at this point.
When you live in a world that requires bills to be paid via mobile, rent to be paid via mobile, mass transit tickets bought via mobile, physical location reservation via mobile, as well as any customer service only available via mobile... who cares about personal addiction; normal life isn't feasible without a mobile phone at that point, and very few (if any at all) mobile phones are designed from the premise that they should respect your attention.

The mobile phones that are designed to preserve the users attention are widely incompatible with any functions that the user needs (billpay/specific group apps, whatever) to stay integrated with the systems being forced upon them, so those options are already non-starter.

That means this problem is worth discussing -- non-compulsive normal people as well as compulsive addicts are being affected by the lack of 'respect for attention' that mobile phones have, and this problem intersects with the 'required prevalence' of mobile phones across the world.

Summary of recent Sci-Hub legal challenges

I really wonder how this is going to play out. For those who don't follow the current situation with Sci-Hub, Alexandra (the creator and likely the sole operator) of Sci-Hub shut down the part of the website ("the magical proxy") that is responsible for fetching the papers that were not previously retrieved. This was done to comply with the request of the Indian court, as described in the article.
As a result, any papers published in 2021 (and some of the rarer, older ones, that nobody tried to access in the past) are not retrievable by Sci-Hub. The user only gets to see a white screen.

This is meant to be a temporary measure, but it's been going on since December of last year (due to various court hearing delays), and the desperation in online communities like the r/scihub subreddit has been palpable [1,2].

The word 'metaverse' is starting to get grossly overused and lose meaning.

Any mention of FB is inevitably pretty devisive on HN.

"Share a private virtual room with friends. Watch videos, play with 3D objects, or just hang out"

Works impressively well on pancake browsers as well. Found via HN.

I hate so many aspects of recent reddit, it somehow continues to get worse.

It’s shocking to me how people sell out like this. You have to know deep down that all these hostile short term juicers destroy the brand, each malfeasance creating more room for a competitor. I mean you guys replaced Digg, cmon.
The audacity to claim “it works”, in italics no less.

The real shame of the current tech companies is they have no principles, no long term vision. They all feel like they follow the same curve, a bunch of managers hitting KPIs during their 2-5 year stint before trading up, ending in some PE firm diving in at the end for the final squeeze.

They’re lemons being juiced dry, when they should be a garden of lemon trees.

“But we got 20% more juice than last year!!”

Yea, you did.

From hackernews.

GitLab security scanning has a similar issue of false positives (many Node security vulns in frontend-only code). But at least they can be marked as resolved!

Either infuriating or upsetting how long we have known about this and done nothing.

HN discussion, including some good comments like this:

The time for decisive action was at least a decade ago, but there's no harm in starting now — it just means that the transition to alternative energy sources must be more abrupt and more investment must be allocated to remedial technologies that can work towards undoing at least some portion of the damage we have done to our biosphere.

Let historians and the next generations worry about whose fault it was. It is more important to secure for the next generation a sustainable and habitable future, than it is to look back at past hubris and wonder where it went wrong.

A counter to the "but I always use cmd R" argument. Stripping away useful UI so things look clean is not a good design approach.

Though I don't think I ever worked as hard as the commentor, this bit felt pretty relatable:

One thing that always happened at the end of a semester is we'd have a few days after exams but before flights back home. On these days I'd typically try playing a video game (my hobby before college) and every time I would stop playing after just an hour with deep feeling of unease at the pit of my stomach. "Alarm bells" is exactly how I would describe it - a feeling at the core of my psyche that I have been wasting time and there must be something productive I should be doing or thinking about.

Years later, having tackled anxiety problems that had plagued me most of my life, I came to recognize that my relationship with hard work during my college years was not healthy and that this deep seated desire to do more work is not a positive thing, at least not for me.

Some complaints about the lack of obvious scrollable areas.

And HN discussion with some more.