bschne

Aside: Does HN auto-replace certain terms in titles? Pretty sure I wrote "Dall-E" here.

Oh man this brings backs memories! When I grew up, we had this one book with all kinds of DIY home improvement and house-building instructions I loved to leaf through. It got so much use (and I think had already been passed to my family used!) that it completely fell apart multiple times. We sort of re-bound it with a similar method involving glue and some kind of reinforced transparent adhesive film more than once!

Three I haven't seen so far:

Ben Eater (low-level digital hardware stuff, builds a computer from gates basically)

Thought Emporium (Molecular Bio)

The Coding Train (Creative Coding)

Also nice to just watch random MITx & similar lectures sometimes

Can you get lucky with the initial configuration of the cube in some way, or is is shuffled in a way that ensures roughly equally hard solves? What's the protocol here?

Aside: The way this was soundtracked with the perfectly timed drum hits was really cool!

I know this is slightly off what the article is concerned with, but the important question in a business context is whether this prediction is worth anything, i.e. whether it can be turned into revenue that wouldn't be generated in the absence of the prediction.

From the introduction :)

> 1.1 Why You Should Want to Know About Abduction > If you are consulting this book with malicious intent, looking for ways to expand your criminal pursuits, I encourage you to stop reading and to better your life. (...)

Interesting rabbit hole! Does that mean the margin is defined to contain once-in-twenty-years extremes?

I'm still often struggling with this, but I do find there's a certain "activation energy" needed — on many real-world, very practical projects my interest only developed as I made some initial progress, realized "interfacing with the messiness of the real world" was its own intriguing intellectual puzzle, and got the hang of dealing with (and appreciating!) people who had more external thinking instead of dismissing it wholesale. Also, while puzzling is it's own satisfaction, I found I was not immune to the gratification of doing something others appreciated and that was "socially" considered useful. Takes some deliberate exposure and practice I guess.

> If a contact is missed, science observations can continue without filling the recorder, and the ground can catch up on the next contact.

Total noob question but how exactly does this part work? It seems like if you record close to the 4h transmission limit of data between contacts it wouldn't be possible to catch up on next contacts and not fill up the recorder. Is it not possible to record that much data in the timeframe between contacts, or is there some safety margin in the transmission limit they state for this reason?

From the code it looks like they used this: http://ai2html.org

The FAQ on the front page provides a hint as to why this might be superior to just using an SVG or PNG.

My grandfather once built a phone line simulator you could connect up to 8 or 10 phones to and actually dial them by a one-digit number. I think he got the schematics from some old electronics magazine. Definitely one of the coolest „toys“ I ever got as a kid.

Are there any best practices on using one of the "-sk" key types and authorizing usage with your security key, vs. storing the whole ssh key on the security key?

Plastic Bertrand, who eats 500 credit cards daily, is an outlier and should not have been counted

Firstly, online communities are usually less comparable to all of your IRL social surroundings, and more comparable to special-interest conferences, festivals, or other places where many somewhat more like-minded people with a shared context meet. There's definitely a lot of self-selection going on here.

Secondly, I believe there's a flipside to many of the things that can go wrong when interacting online. Maybe if you read something without knowing the other person, and without having a ten-year history with them, and you can re-read and take time to ponder your answer, it also allows you to be more thoughtful and not let all the baggage people have with each other in the way?

Aside: The last time I had to scrape a lot of data from the web, I additionally used SQLite, which is a breeze to use with Python (basically one import statement and you're set). It might be overkill for some cases, but I found it a huge boon for keeping track of which pages were scraped, which failed, and doing subsequent data processing and parsing "offline". It made it so much easier to recover from the inevitable random error or different markup somewhere deep in your list of pages to scrape etc.

Same from Switzerland

„Within range of one network“ doesn‘t give you as much information as „all these networks are visible and here‘s how strong they look from where you are“

Mind sharing your routine? Dealing w/ similar issues and been meaning to try this sort of thing for a while after a few friends have recommended it…

These are great, but with some of them I cannot help but wonder why MSFT would choose not to include them in the OS by default. They seem fairly unobtrusive and like they wouldn't add too much complexity to the product in return for what you get in terms of better usability and/or additional functionality.

Of course you could argue that you always have to be very careful not to overload and bloat your software product, especially if it's an OS — but windows contains two different consoles, about three versions of the system preferences management, ..., it just doesn't seem like MSFT to be that picky about what they'll put into their product.

> Honestly to me the M1 era of Apple is the more exciting than things have been in years.

Yes, I feel like this is somehow still massively underappreciated. They pulled off a major hardware transition without big hiccups (I'm sure someone's going to point some I have missed in the comments /s) and launched a bunch of devices that are an incredible leap forward. I mean the baseline M1 air starts at $1k and is an incredible piece of hardware for most usage.

Tangentially reminded me of this documentary about the Soviets using a nuke to shut off a gas blowout - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KJ6p4JVN4g

Pretty sure you'd have some sort of "gracefully pull over" and "hard emergency stop" options in those once they are actually used for passengers? There's other reasons than police stops you would want to have the option.

I'm guessing the plan is that once you reach that scale there will be people in the cars?

Another favs list: https://lethain.com/some-of-my-favorite-technical-papers/

There's also an arms race thing going on if others start buying ads for things you'd rank highly for

Well that works in some ways, but it can also be very hard to disentangle the actual causal impact of an ad campaign! Absent running an experiment, you don't really know if people would or would not have bought through some other channel without your campaign.

The most striking example is probably the experiment Tadelis convinced eBay to run on their brand-name ads, though the subtlety applies to less obvious cases of questionable ad spend too — https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/stadelis/Tadelis.pdf

> seemingly small (implicit) assumptions like this that can have huge implications on results necessitates skepticism toward academic economics

It mostly just means you need to be very careful in interpreting the results, or be careful when someone uses it to motivate policy prescriptions as they themselves may have a questionable interpretation — like with any academic finding.

I was expecting the webcam feed to look at lot less... normal

If there's any merit to these figures, this is pretty crazy. I'm tempted to side with apple b/c I generally think they're at least less bad than FB and I value any platform taking steps to further privacy.

But the fact that a company can do this to another company at the flick of a switch by changing the rules of the game on a whim is still kind of scary, even if I think it's for the better in this instance.