HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

SamBam

12,409 karma · joined September 29, 2015

submissionscomments
SamBam··on Dostoyevsky isn't difficult
I can't imagine how much amazing and important literature you'd miss if you were snobby enough to think that you could only read things in their original language.

I'm so glad I get to read the Russians and Kafka and Calvino and Murakami and Camus and Marquez and Homer and Plato and, heck, the Bible.

I do know the feeling. I struggled through the start of My Brilliant Friend because I ought to read it in Italian, because I speak it pretty well. So then I didn't read it for years. Finally I just read it in English and enjoyed myself.

SamBam··on Slow breathing modulates brain function and risk behavior
I was confused when I first read it as well, but the implication is that the higher reward-seeking risk tolerance can actually be more rational than the well-studied loss-aversion bias that the authors mention.

Looking into this more, studies have found that we tend to rate the possible loss of $100 twice as painfully as the pleasure from the possible gain of $100. This can lead to irrational behaviors.

Increasing the weight we give to potential rewards is not necessarily a bad thing.

I think this can help explain the "calming of the nerves" that slow breathing promotes. If you need to speak in public and your heart is racing and you're shaking, this is an irrational reaction to what ought to be a very safe situation. By focusing more on the rewards (the acclaim for a good speech or whatever) and less on the imagined risks, you can calm down and speak naturally.

SamBam··on I Stored a Website in a Favicon
> The important catch

> The favicon doesn't actually contain the whole website itself.

This is the kind of thing that is extremely idiomatic LLM speak. There's nothing particularly wrong about it per se, but it just makes everyone who is familiar with LLMs say "oh, it's written by an AI" and it just becomes disappointing.

SamBam··on I used sound waves to make espresso
A large percent of espresso in the US is drunk iced. Iced Americanos, iced lattes, iced shaken espressos.

If you don't need to heat the water before cooling it down it would be an enegy savings.

SamBam··on I used sound waves to make espresso
> For the espresso samples, participants could not reliably tell the traditional and ultrasonic versions apart. There were no significant differences in aroma, flavour, bitterness or overall liking.
SamBam··on Fox to buy Roku
Nah. I have a Roku 3 stick and a brand-new $700 projector with Google TV. The Roku 3 is light-years ahead in terms of speed and UI ergonomics over the Google machine. And both are better than the smart TVs I've used.

But I fear this need means this time is ending, and we'll only be left with crap.

SamBam··on Kagi Magic
I'm a teacher. Our kids are using Chromebooks, and we want them to do research projects, but we don't want them using AI. Unfortunately with Google, it's impossible not to get AI answers. As far as we know, there's no clean way to filter out the Gemini garbage. I wonder if Kagi has considered making an educational pricing model, and letting our kids get away from AI.

Of course, the "Chromebook" part of my statement above is probably a hint that getting rid of Gemini won't be as simple as changing the default search engine...

SamBam··on How we made hit video game Prince of Persia
I feel like unresponsive controls must have been a platform or hardware issue. On my (...Dell with Windows 3.1?) the controls were perfectly responsive, and they absolutely had to be. So many things relied on being able to, say, run and switch directions on a dime so that only your toe touched the platform that would then fall and break.
SamBam··on Show HN: Gravity – Interactive solar-system simulator, from Newton to Einstein
The tutorial made it seem a little too much like there is only one speed that would keep us in orbit. Any slower and we'd crash, any faster and we'd leave.

In fact, though, if you've ever played any game with orbiting mechanics you'd see that it's extremely difficult to get out of orbit if you're in orbit. Going faster simply increases the size of your orbit, and going slower simply shrinks it.

Note that no space program has ever managed (or tried) to send an object into the sun. We're already starting off with such a high orbital velocity, 30km/s, that we'd need to send a rocket backwards at nearly that speed just to slow it down enough to make it crash into the sun. That would require massively more energy than anything we've ever done before.

SamBam··on Show HN: Gravity – interactive solar-system simulator, from Newton to Einstein
Everything you're saying is right, but I'm not seeing what's wrong with step 14. Did they edit it?

> Earth turns once every 23 h 56 min (one sidereal day) about an axis tilted 23.4° (the blue line). That spin gives us day and night; the tilt gives us the seasons.

Nothing in step 14 to me implies s procession of the axis.

SamBam··on Show HN: Performative-UI – A react component library of design tropes
Huh, perfectly snappy on my Firefox on Android.
SamBam··on Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?
> wtaf? Do you really think this is the reality?

Of course. American varsity soccer players play ~5 times a week for four months a year, August through November.

February through April is the Spring season and varsity teams are forbidden from playing too much. D1 and D2 teams can only train 8 hours per week, of which at most 4 hours per week may be coached!

And then 4 months of the year are off-season and there is no structured training at all!

This is a ridiculously small amount of time compared to a 15 year old Spanish kid playing in a farm team.

And they're doing this part-time stuff until they're 22 or 23. A typical European professional player would have been playing full time since they were 16.

> college soccer is essentially another international semi-pro league

... except no where near at the level of European farm teams.

SamBam··on Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?
Basketball is the only sport in the US that has a similar level of hundreds of hours a year of unstructured play, so it makes sense that the US is great at it.

Hockey, who is the US competing against? Canada. No other country in the world takes it particularly seriously, so of course the US is one of the top two countries... (I often tell each of my two kids that they're one of my top two kids.)

SamBam··on Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?
So leaving aside whether 5-6 times is "a few," the bigger issue is the length of the season.

Varsity soccer season in the US is usually just four months, August-November.

Spring season (with no games) is February-April. During that season, NCAA places strict limitations on how often teams can practice: Division I and II teams are allowed only up to 8 hours per week, with just 4 of those being coach-supervised! [1]

Finally there is no organized playing for all of January, May, June and July.

So even for a player in a D1 team, they are training much, much less of the year than a 15-year-old on a farm team in Europe.

1. https://ballatyourfeet.com/when-is-college-soccer-season-fal...

SamBam··on Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?
I don't think the article really tried to answer the question, though maybe that wasn't its intent and the author was genuinely asking.

I think an answer would need to look at the difference in how kids and teens play soccer in the US vs other countries.

In the US soccer is mostly a younger kids' sport, and is generally highly structured, with kids playing on teams once or twice a week. Compare to Europe, where many boys are playing once or twice every day, in an unstructured format, during recess and after school.

Starting from a young age, Europeans who show talent are getting drafted into soccer academies before they're 10, greatly increasing the amount of competitive play. But this is on top of the everyday soccer they're playing.

For a US kid, soccer is typically "pay to play." A local league costs money. A private high school with a good program costs money. In Europe, beyond (again) the continuous unstructured play, the academies and farm teams are free.

Finally, a good European player doesn't usually head to college. They may be playing for a serious club team at 17 or 18.

Meanwhile, a gifted US soccer player heads to college (maybe on a scholarship but maybe not--again, pay to play), plays for the varsity team a few times a week during the season, and four years later might get on one of the relatively few club teams.

SamBam··on 1-Bit Bonsai Image 4B Image Generation for Local Devices
Same order of magnitude.
SamBam··on Obsidian plugin was abused to deploy a remote access trojan
User should be required to explain the situation to an older and a younger family member, and get permission from both of them.
SamBam··on CARA 2.0 – “I Built a Better Robot Dog”
I wonder how accurate a virtual model could be made of this, which could be iterated on millions of times faster.

My first project as a research assistant in AI was doing evolutionary algorithms on Khepera robots, which had a virtual Java implementation. We were able to evolve some pretty cool behaviors, although I don't know what would have happened if we had uploaded them into a physical Khepera robot.

SamBam··on The Thinking Plant's Man (2025)
That debate is 90% of the article.
SamBam··on Talking to strangers at the gym
My wife is a great compliment giver. She'll walk down the street and see a person wearing a great shirt and say "Oh my God, I love that shirt! It looks so great on you!"

The other person will smile and laugh, and they'll exchange a couple other words, and then be on their way.

What do you think my wife is looking for that's a red flag?

SamBam··on New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag
Presumably Banksy and associates would have been arrested too if they had been caught. This whole thing relies on doing it in a way that people don't question it while it's happening.
SamBam··on How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]
Cliffhanger! Did it end with millions of Americans being freed forever from government surveillance?!?

j/k It's a good excerpt, and makes me want to read the book.

SamBam··on Cursor Camp
You need to stop spamming this message. This isn't Reddit.
SamBam··on Cursor Camp
Find treasure hunting equipment on the beach...
SamBam··on Cursor Camp
I only managed to get out once I had earned all 9 badges...
SamBam··on I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it
I think the tapping phones feature -- for initial friend creation, not upkeep -- is THE killer feature of the app.

Do I want my teens on any social media apps? No.

Would I let them be on Facebook of 2006, when you were just connected to your friends and family, and not influencers and "the algorithm?" Sure! That and early Instagram were great ways to keep up with real-life friends.

If you made this as easy and pleasant to scroll through as 2011 Instagram was, with only-real friends allowed, I might even return to social media myself. It would beat having to WhatsApp my family my vacation photos.

(And heck, if this got big enough that celebrities were bumping phones with fans, heck, at least that's a more intentional connection than Insta forcing the latest wellness guru on my teen girl.)

SamBam··on Show HN: A cartographer's attempt to realistically map Tolkien's world
It's probably just me, but I'm having trouble finding any images of the Middle Earth maps except for Numenor, Valinor and Aman. Maybe it's just OP's title that led me to expect otherwise?
SamBam··on Artemis computer running two instances of MS outlook; they can't figure out why
Alpine and Mutt are about 20 and 30 years old, respectively.
SamBam··on Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
How about something that they would see more as a genuine threat?

Bet on whether they get into a car accident, and then see what happens if all of a sudden that number starts spiking towards 100%.

SamBam··on Little Free Library
Same reason you're allowed to gift your gold watch to someone, or sell your car.

Both of them do potentially deprive the creator of a sale, but they keep the same total number of things in circulation.

Sure, you can argue that philosophically it comes to the same thing, but the problem is that, if you win that argument, the powers that be are more likely to ban giving away things you own than they are to allow piracy...

← PreviousPage 4 of 34Next →