hx2a

I once read a book about this: How to Build a Dinosaur: The New Science of Reverse Evolution, by Jack Horner and James Gorman. The basic idea is that dinosaur DNA is carried around by modern day chickens. The concept seemed pretty out there but the book does make a convincing argument for why it should be possible. The first author is a well known paleontologist, and the book was recommended to me by a paleontologist before I spent the week (as a volunteer) in his field crew.

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> The technology for this doesn't exist yet, and the ethics would be extremely questionable.

I do agree with this. Just because we can do it, doesn't mean we should.

Regular user. For useful tasks, how much of a difference does the Pro plan make?

And yet, generative AI also seems to be poor at randomness. When I ask Google Gemini for a list of 50 random words, it gave me a list of 18 unique words, with 16 of them repeated exactly 3 times.

Abyss: 1 Ambiguous: 3 Cacophony: 3 Crescendo: 3 Ephemeral: 3 Ethereal: 3 Euphoria: 3 Labyrinth: 3 Maverick: 3 Melancholy: 3 Mellifluous: 3 Nostalgia: 3 Oblivion: 3 Paradox: 3 Quixotic: 1 Serendipity: 3 Sublime: 3 Zenith: 3

I believe Jim Simons is also one of the founders behind the National Museum of Mathematics in NYC.

https://momath.org/

> It's not just "grit" - it's the entire field of "TED-Talk-headlining applied psychology [allegedly] based in research."

I see, I know what you are getting at here. I stay away from TED talks specifically because I know those lack substance.

Thanks for the guidance, I will read more about this.

Can you elaborate on this?

Currently I am reading the book Grit by Angela Duckworth. The author cites studies of grit and has done much research on the subject. Are you suggesting that that research does not replicate?

https://angeladuckworth.com/grit-book/

This is a neat project but it doesn't seem to render the plant at the moment. It did render plants 20 minutes ago - perhaps the HN load has hurt it?

All of the code is available online, with great documentation. There is, in fact, a server back end for this project:

https://github.com/jim-fx/plantarium/tree/main https://github.com/jim-fx/plantarium/blob/main/ARCHITECTURE....

I will be back in a few days when it is working again.

Also available for Firefox!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/what-hacker-n...

Source code:

https://github.com/pinoceniccola/what-hn-says-webext

> I spent some time porting some of the functions to Python, but realized to make it useful it'd be a bigger effort than I had time and skill.

Getting py5 off the ground started during pandemic lockdown and took many months. Managing the source code is best done computationally, with py5generator creating the actual py5 source code.

https://github.com/py5coding/py5generator https://github.com/py5coding/py5

> ps: I noticed you're using JPype to connect to the Java Processing libraries. Very smart.

JPype is a solid and well maintained library. With JPype, py5 is well positioned to work with numpy and the rest of python's scientific tools.

> Py5 looks awesome! Will give it a try soon. Thanks for your work!

You are welcome! I hope you enjoy it!

> Making gifs with processing is (weirdly) one of the more painful exercises in the framework. Kind of baffling, given the goals of the project.

FWIW, py5 makes it very easy to create animated GIFs. You can create a GIF from a running sketch with one line of code:

https://py5coding.org/reference/py5tools_animated_gif.html

py5 is a version of Processing for Python 3.8+ that is well integrated into the Python ecosystem. It connects the Processing Jars to Python using JPype. If you like Processing, please give it a try!

(I am the author of py5)

Yes! There is py5.

https://py5coding.org/

This version of Processing uses the amazing JPype library to connect the Processing Jars (Java) to Python 3.8+.

(I am the creator of py5)

I once worked in a financial firm with an intern who did nothing else besides pick his nose. No joke, that's the only thing he did. He made no attempt to do actual work or help our team and no attempt to hide his nose picking.

His father was a senior executive and so he knew he would get a seat on the equity trading desk no matter what, so he didn't care about us. I hated that guy, and I hated him even more because I knew his career would be way more successful than mine would ever be.

The finance industry (and surely other industries) have this concept of "pedigree" that values some people more than others. It's bad for the organizations because poorly qualified nose-pickers get promoted as they coast by in life, while others who are working hard to improve themselves and add value will either get passed over or used as pawns.

I always ask a direct question about ethics. Something like, "tell me about the kinds of ethical problems that this team is faced with and how you handle them." Good answers involve speaking up about the problem right away & not try to hide anything and being transparent with relevant entities. Bad answers are things like "there haven't been any ethical problems," because that most likely signals that ethical problems are being ignored or overlooked.

Nice work!

> Note that this is a resource-intensive filter. Memoization is strongly advised!

Can you make this be the default for non Safari browsers? This really made my CPU fan work hard. Also, why does this need to recalculate the image so many times a second if it is the same image each time? It really only needs to redraw when I change one of the options.

> Nowadays the closest I've gotten to this is the people who keep using my Gmail address as their own email address. I find this behavior rather bizarre and don't know what it achieves.

I have this problem also! I thought it was rare. In my case I think the person is very bad with computers and doesn't know what their email address is. I've gotten emails from their bank, cell phone, and even online dating. I tried mailing them a letter once to tell them they are making a mistake but nothing changed.

Please learn more about the needs of blind people before writing something like this.

Adding accessibility for screen readers is much more difficult to add later in the project lifecycle. Thinking about those design considerations early makes a big difference in how accessible it will later. If developers don't think about these things early, most likely the product will never be fully accessible, ever. Blind people have seen this played out before with other software products and know where this path leads.

(I'm not blind but have worked with blind developers. I'm not an expert in accessibility but I know enough to know how important it is to listen to accessibility needs)

For anyone else looking for the 5th book:

https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/seeing-with-fresh-eyes

> The only way you’ll stop this thing from mutating into a variant not covered by the vaccine is by eradicating it everywhere, simultaneously.

Even if it were possible and achievable to vaccinate all humans, we'd still have a problem because COVID has spread to other mammal species. There's no reasonable plan that I know of to vaccinate animals in the wild.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/11/10/1054224...

> We’re all in this together. When COVID spreads in Africa and makes a new strain, it may as well be on your own doorstep. The world needs to step up and distribute vaccines to every corner of the globe, for FREE, or we’ll never get out of this.

But you're 100% right about this. I don't want what I said about your last sentence to diminish the importance of wealthy nations sharing the vaccine with other countries. We're all in this together. The idea that a country can vaccinate only their own citizens and then consider this problem solved is completely false.

Can someone tell me more about how the predefined Game of Life patterns came to be? It it fascinating to me that these have names that people remember. I know this subject is well researched, but are the researchers finding these things randomly or is there some kind of analytical approach to design patterns that are likely to have a desired result?

When I was in High School (early 90's) we got a new computer system that nobody was using yet. I discovered there was an email system of some kind and that every student had an email address that we were not told about. I also discovered Tetris installed in a directory on the server. I was able to play Tetris and I could show other students how to access it, but it was inconvenient to get to.

Therefore I decided I would email Tetris to every student (I emailed the executable, not a link to Tetris), making it easier for everyone to play also. As soon as I did this the entire system got very slow...apparently the server had no quotas or partitioning and the hundreds of copies of Tetris filled up 100% of the hard drive space. It was a disaster. The computer "specialist" had no idea how to fix the system and she was teaching an adult education class that evening that required the system to work. She was furious and wanted me to get suspended. It didn't happen though because I spoke up about the problem right when I knew there was a problem and also some other teachers intervened on my behalf.

The woman who was responsible for the computer system back then is now the superintendent of the school system. I wonder if she remembers me.

And the reality of a "wrench attack" is illustrated in this xkcd comic:

https://xkcd.com/538/

For people who are interested in the mentioned RL resources, here are the two links:

https://spinningup.openai.com/en/latest/

https://lilianweng.github.io/lil-log/

We wouldn't have been able to build it without some kind of approval and agreement of who we would bill our time to. Although I should point out that "vigilante projects" (as I call them) do have a place in investment banks, and people who can write code on their own can do a lot to improve their situation. I remember a different job where myself and one other person each created vigilante projects that later turned out to be absolutely critical for properly monitoring internal systems. Vigilante projects are created in defiance of the incompetence of upper management.

A reason to use old computers that I don't see mentioned here has to do with accessibility. People in the US usually have current hardware such as the latest Mac laptop, but that is not the case in all other countries. Current hardware is a bit of a luxury that we don't fully appreciate.

I have an open source project with global users, and one person in Mexico contacted me looking for help. He was trying to create 3D visualizations of MRI brain scans and was running it on an old computer that hardly anybody in the US would consider using. Happily I had done testing on an old laptop and much performance tuning during my development. I was able to help him get his project working. It was still slow, but at least it was usable. It wouldn't have been if my code only worked on current hardware.

Around 2003 I worked at Merrill Lynch, on the IT side supporting investment banking. Our users were creating Pitchbooks, which are these 100 page PowerPoint presentations that contain a lot of financial data taken from various financial statements. The junior employees toil for hours putting these things together for senior managers.

We had an idea that we could build an application to produce much of the pitchbooks using current tools to pull data from financial statements and generate complete decks. What previously took dozens of hours could be done for them in 15 minutes, saving the junior employees an enormous amount of time.

The Managing Directors rejected the project because they wanted their junior employees to suffer the same way that they did. That was the actual explanation they gave us. It's just work for the sake of work.

Really? That's not what they told me when I worked there. They were such flimsy vehicles, so what I was told sounded reasonable.

Looks wonky but I would have preferred to drive one of these. Those two cameras would have been super helpful, plus that blind spot warning for the left side. Those will make a big difference.

Also, these have air conditioning!! What a luxury! The previous ones did not have that. Just a sad little fan that barely did anything.

Postal workers don't care what the vehicles look like, they want practical safety features that help them do their jobs.

I'm a former postal worker (summer job in the 90's) and I drove some of those postal trucks. I drove the "half ton" and "quarter ton" trucks. Those are the small or very small delivery trucks you would typically see in residential neighborhoods.

Those things were named after their actual weight and made of aluminum. Obviously driving around in a 500 or 1000 pound vehicle when every other car weighs considerably more is anxiety producing. Plus the driver seat is inverted compared to every other US vehicle, so my visibility to the left side and rear was poor. Plus other drivers can't be expected to know or understand that my ability to see them is different from what is typical of other drivers. Plus if the vehicle was damaged in any way, I would be fired, even if it was clearly not my fault.

Fun times! And great memories. What a unique summer job to have while in college.

Can you suggest a book on negotiation? I know I'm terrible at it and could really use such a book.

> I also use a Vim Firefox extension to minimize my mouse use browsing the internet.

Which one? Vimium-FF? How well does it compare to Vimium in Chromium?

I've been wanting to switch from Chromium to Firefox but can't live without Vimium. If it works well, I'll make the switch.