15 ms·
Ask HN: What interesting thought did you read on HN but couldn't find later?
- spython 8y agoThere was a comment about the theory, that emotions are not represented in the body but actually happen there. And we learn to interpret the bodily state as having an emotion. Can't find it.
- roddux 8y agoThere's some really interesting literature about this topic, I only discovered it recently. I'd recommend starting with 'The Good Gut' by Justin Sonnenburg. An excerpt can be found here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-feelings-the-second-brain-in-our-gastrointestinal-systems-excerpt/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-feelings-the-...
- spython 8y agoThanks, I'll look into it! I recently found the theory of Lynn Margulis interesting, that we are all holobionts, not just relying on symbiotic bacteria but critically dependent on them, for breaking down food just as well as for staying healty. In that sense, we are less individuals and more landscapes, gardens that foster life.
- anon1253 8y agoThere are various theories of emotion (overview here https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-psychology/chapter/theories-of-emotion/ https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-psychology/chapt...). I think you might've been looking for the James–Lange theory? "The James–Lange theory refers to a hypothesis on the origin and nature of emotions and is one of the earliest theories of emotion within modern psychology. It was developed independently by two 19th-century scholars, William James and Carl Lange. The basic premise of the theory is that physiological arousal instigates the experience of emotion. Instead of feeling an emotion and subsequent physiological (bodily) response, the theory proposes that the physiological change is primary, and emotion is then experienced when the brain reacts to the information received via the body's nervous system." — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James%E2%80%93Lange_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James%E2%80%93Lange_theory
- anbende 8y agoThis is the James-Lange theory of emotions. Enjoy!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- soult 8y agoIt may have been this article: The Evolution of Pleasure and Pain - Antonio Damasio Tells Us Why Pain Is Necessary http://nautil.us/issue/56/perspective/antonio-damasio-tells-us-why-pain-is-necessary http://nautil.us/issue/56/perspective/antonio-damasio-tells-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16206053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16206053
- Erwin 8y agoNot sure if that was article, but catching up with my fire hazard of paper subscriptions I recently read this article on emotion intelligence and that theory of what emotion is: http://nautil.us/issue/51/limits/emotional-intelligence-needs-a-rewrite http://nautil.us/issue/51/limits/emotional-intelligence-need...
- spython 8y agoSomebody was writing about a concept of negotiations that focuses on values of the other party, and asking the question "what if your value is met" instead of arguing for your positions. The example was about gun control: "what if there's no crime, would you be willing to give up guns?"
- jdietrich 8y agoI suspect you're referring to this essay by Scott Alexander: http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/08/varieties-of-argumentative-experience/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/08/varieties-of-argumentat... In the context of negotiation, the book Getting To Yes describes a similar concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_to_Yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_to_Yes
- earlyriser 8y agoSome article 2-3 years ago about discovering a new "code" inside the DNA code, with a comparison like writing in the fore edge of a book.
- amacbride 8y agoYou may be thinking about some work that was done regarding mutational effects on conformation and expression. (Molecular biologists have known about it for a long time, but this was an interesting information-theoretical approach from a group of physicists.) https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-confirm-a-second-layer-of-information-hiding-in-dna https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-confirm-a-second-lay...
- codebeaker 8y agoAn article about EV vs. ICE was posted, written from the perspective of an EV being the natural way of building things (few moving parts, little heat loss, etc) and that this ICE was an intricate machine of thousands of parts channeling the spirit of fine watchmaking or Jules Verne. I found the perspective refreshing but have never been able to find it since.
- ernsheong 8y agoTry out https://www.pagedash.com https://www.pagedash.com to help save pages you read for reference later! (Maker here)
- qop 8y agoAll of these apps are essentially the same. I have to click some extra button or drag and drop some extra thing, and then when your service disappears I have to grab my export and figure out how to import it to the next one. What does your product offer over the hundreds of other sites that do exactly the same thing? Have you innovated in this space?
- ernsheong 8y agoI tried to offer a one-click solution (no additional drag and drop). It also tries to capture the page as you saw it in the browser, HTML and all (more faithfully than Evernote, at least). See related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15653206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15653206
- tluyben2 8y agoDoes it have apps for mobile to share-save? Pretty important. The following would make me move from Pocket; Support for PDF, ppt, etc. Offline reading on Desktop (Pocket works fine on mobile but on Desktop it seems not very good). And yes, total export so when you close the doors, I do not have to start over.
- yread 8y agoI can't think of anything that I could not find but I just wanted to say that it is a great idea for a thread!
- bobberkarl 8y agoA blog post about specific advertisement targeting on facebook. Something along the lines of specifically making ads for some identified users.
- qop 8y agoThere was a post the other day about a guy who targeted Reddit's CEO by essentially doxxing him and using geo targeted single shot ad runs with the guys name in big letters. Was that it?
- NicoJuicy 8y agoNo, there was a better one targeting his roommate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8330931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8330931
- kodablah 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17110385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17110385 ?
- slow_donkey 8y agoShould be this or the top comment
- bobberkarl 8y agoThank you !
- ahmedfromtunis 8y agoAn article about some species of octopuses that have a relatively high IQ, but since the parents die before their offspring comes to life, every generation have to relearn everything from scratch. IIRC, the lack of inter-generational communication deprived this species from developing to the level its IQ permits. I wish I can find that piece again!
- severine 8y agoIs it this one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13354852#13363510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13354852#13363510
- nabla9 8y agoThey also live very short lifespans. Typically 2 years. Giant octopuses can live as long 3-5 years. It does not matter how smart you are if you can't learn from parent and have only few years to gain life experience.
- fwdpropaganda 8y agoAre we learning a lot from our parents? I had highly educated parents (university professors) and what I learned from them was a tiny fraction of the total amount of things that I've learned so far (from written material, other people, and life experience). I think there's merit to what you said, but I don't think the crucial bit is the parents specifically. I think the crucial bit is that without language you can't easily communicate to others what you've learned, at least not complex things. This aspect doesn't depends on life expectancy as much. Instead it depends on two things: how much knowledge there is in society (of octopuses) and how doable it is to communicate that knowledge.
- Schoolmeister 8y agoYou're kind of disproving your own point here, no? Or at least, both the fact that its parents die and that they have no language creates a vicious circle. Though you skipped over it, probably the most important skill you've learnt from your parents is language. The octopus' parents die before they can transfer that skill. Hence, they can (barely) communicate with others of the same species and elevate their collective knowledge.
- snailmailman 8y agoNot a "interesting thought" really, but I thought someone posted a link to a site for "un-mangling" text. would fix all the formatting issues like &, and other various issues caused by copy/pasting text from place to place. I forget what I was doing recently but I thought "I should use that site" and couldn't find it anywhere after lots of searching. I should have bookmarked it :-/
- lozenge 8y agoWas it a mojibake (text encoding) fixer?
- anon1253 8y agoMaybe not what you remember, but maybe this helps? https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/python-ftfy/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/python-ftfy/blob/master/R...
- teddyh 8y agoYou probably mean this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16103356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16103356
- snailmailman 8y agoAh, yes this was it! thanks!
- rapfaria 8y agoJust a reminder to always upvote/favorite what you consider relevant, and you can find it later on your profile, in case you don't use an app like Pocket to consolidate everything.
- mayankkaizen 8y agoI use Materialistic app for HN. Saved there many stories. Lost my mobile. Then I realized this app saves stories only locally.
- slow_donkey 8y agoMaterialistic doesn't run any servers
- p49k 8y agoAn article that provided a strong argument for why you should never stop reading, even if you forget most of what you read. There are a few articles I’ve found via Google on the same subject but they are not the one I saw on HN.
- rdeboo 8y agoPerhaps this essay by Paul Graham? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753526
- kadenshep 8y agoThe one set of material you probably shouldn't read.
- swyx 8y agowhy do you say this? i want to understand your point of view.
- kadenshep 8y agoBecause PG's essays are intellectually uninteresting and often times mistaken (which is a nice way of putting incorrect). If the essay's didn't have his name on it, they'd be harshly critiqued when they get past around these parts. If you're looking for academic perspectives, especially around the subjects of rhetoric and debate, there is absolutely nothing worth reading in those essays. Quite frankly I find it annoying whenever I see someone linking to them. It's junk food for your mind, with some Silicon Valley sprinkles on top. I mean look at this gem in the linked essay: >So although not knowing how you know things may seem part of being human, it may not be.
- laurentl 8y agoOn a thread about stories you found interesting but lost, a story about reading even if you forget. How very meta
- 8y ago
- rahidz2003 8y agoThere was this blog post about how to form yearly goals, maybe for New Year’s resolutions or something? I remember they were divided into 10-15 categories, dealing with all areas of life (career, health, family, etc.) and had probing but specific questions in each.
- varal7 8y agoMaybe this? http://yearcompass.com http://yearcompass.com
- rishabhjain 8y agohttps://alexvermeer.com/8760hours/ https://alexvermeer.com/8760hours/ There you go!
- qrbLPHiKpiux 8y agoWhen a metric is targeted, it fails to be a good metric.
- pimlottc 8y agoThere was a good quote about commercial interests becoming entrenched, something about once a business gets accustom to making a profit in some way it stars to think of it as a right and argues in that fashion to defend it.
- jacob_rezi 8y agoThere was a thread about sole founders who have experienced success. Notably, there was a someone who developed a resume software and was able to sell his company to the German government (if my memory serves right). Anyways, as the sole founder of a resume company, I found the story inspirational, yet I was never able to find the thread again. related, my company - https://rezi.io https://rezi.io
- severine 8y agoMaybe this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073667
- jacob_rezi 8y agoThank you so much this is exactly what I was looking for
- gojomo 8y agoSomeone mentioned a scifi short story with link to online version that I followed & read. The story was about a uploaded-human AI-spaceship that for a time worked as a asteroid miner. After a single overmind takes over 1st the inner planets, then the whole solar system, the protagonist to flee to insterstellar space, but is pursued by an overmind ship. Been trying to find the story/title/author since, with no success.
- jackpirate 8y agoI remember that story, but I sadly can't point you to a link. If you liked that story, you might also like The Egg [], though, which I also found via HN. [] http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
- majewsky 8y agoAsterisks don't work as you expect on HN.
- rlander 8y agoThis book? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32109569-we-are-legion-we-are-bob https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32109569-we-are-legion-w...
- carb 8y agoIf this isn't what the GP is referring to, it should be. I found this book and it's sequel a very fun and quick read.
- sprobertson 8y agoI found and lost a similar story. There were no mentions of human characters, only programs that were evolving in their own digital space. It was a standard HTML page amongst a collection of other works, not a book.
- gojomo 8y ago
- martin_ 8y agoThis is less one that I read, but more one that I wrote. Sometime ~mid 2012 I wrote an Ask HN looking to meet people and find co-working space in the bay area, 6 years later I find myself living here (due to folks I met via that thread). Unfortunately, it was on a separate account and I've never been able to find it
- johnsonjo 8y agoThis should be helpful to finding it. It’s a search hacker news sorted by date with a few key terms. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bay%20area%20ask%20hn%20meet&sort=byDate&prefix&page=3&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bay%20area%20ask%20hn%20meet&s...
- tosh 8y agoA slide deck on compatibility and incompatibility of various Lego bricks.
- BoppreH 8y agoWould that be "Stressing The Elements"[1], an unofficial guide of what connections are considered "illegal" because they are unstable or stress the parts? [1] http://bramlambrecht.com/tmp/jamieberard-brickstress-bf06.pdf http://bramlambrecht.com/tmp/jamieberard-brickstress-bf06.pd...
- brazzledazzle 8y agoI’ve actually been able to find everything with a little bit of work at most. The search engine is actually reasonably good. I also favorite everything even remotely interesting.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoHaha I do the exact same thing. My "favourites" list is a long one. I started doing it because inside half an hour a post can disappear from the front pages.
- latenightcoding 8y agoSomeone shared an MIT or Stanford class titled Deep learning for Biology or for Bioinformatics can't remember. I thought I saved it but couldn't find it anywhere later. Edit: The lectures were on youtube.
- car 8y agoMaybe in reference to this: http://kundajelab.github.io/dragonn/ http://kundajelab.github.io/dragonn/
- Teichopsia 8y agoSeveral, but the one that comes to mind at this moment is from a comment a couple years ago regarding their streaming setup to find movies, shows, etc.
- severine 8y agoLol, could you be more unspecific? I'm trying to help!
- BoppreH 8y agoMeta comment: there's a very active subreddit for finding lost information, https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/ .
- mercer 8y agoMeta comment: I was trying to remember what the name of that subreddit was!
- jswrenn 8y agoI recall reading a phenomenal blog(?) post about data science in history in which the author presented some historical data relating to the northern renaissance (iirc, shipping logs) and then presented two completely plausible but divergent analyses of the data. I've spent hours trying to find it again on multiple occasions with no success. :(
- abhirag 8y agoMaybe this -- https://sappingattention.blogspot.in/2012/11/reading-digital-sources-case-study-in.html?m=1 https://sappingattention.blogspot.in/2012/11/reading-digital...
- severine 8y agoIt sure sounds like it, thanks! That blog's been posted often, but with little success: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sappingattention.blogspot.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sappingattention.blog... This thread is quite amusing, I think I'll fav it.
- benbreen 8y agoGreat blog. The author, incidentally, is a youngish historian named Ben Schmidt. I feel like it's a natural fit with an HN audience given how data-driven his work is, but as you say, it doesn't break through very much. He also created (helped create?) a tool called Bookworm that might be of interest: http://bookworm.culturomics.org http://bookworm.culturomics.org
- severine 8y agoThanks! The Bookworm link doesn't work right now, but I found this demo video very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kAlwiXt0bY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kAlwiXt0bY
- jswrenn 8y agoAlas, not quite! But thanks for pointing me to that article.
- inetknght 8y agoI have lost count of how many stories I'd read here and then wanted to reference it later but could not find it. I'd started to think maybe I was going crazy, maybe the search feature sucks, maybe the links were removed for one reason or another.
- glax 8y agoBookmarked a post about Document OCR that recreates the whole tables with text. Lost to wanacry, cannot find it since. Backup is important, learned the hard way.
- severine 8y agoMy guess: Probabilistic Scraping of Plain Text Tables (edinburghhacklab.com) 92 points by tlarkworthy on Sept 5, 2013 | 12 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6334178#6337769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6334178#6337769 http://edinburghhacklab.com/2013/09/probabalistic-scraping-of-plain-text-tables/ http://edinburghhacklab.com/2013/09/probabalistic-scraping-o...
- EFruit 8y agoSomething about an algorithm designing circuits that shouldn't have worked, but did. I might be mixing another story, but I think it was using electrical interference from an outside source to accomplish its task.
- jon_richards 8y agoI heard that from a hardware professor, but he way saying it was running calculations to generate electrical interference on the board to influence nearby (logically unrelated) calculations. I think he was saying it was a genetic algorithm on an FPGA board. It was designing circuits by simulating them (in hardware), but if you actually tried to build the design in a custom chip it wouldn't work because you'd only have kept the circuit logic, not the interference properties.
- lars 8y agoThis was Adrian Thompson using genetic algorithms to design FPGAs: https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
- amikazmi 8y agoSomeone posted a youtube talk about Game Design that's applicable to general product design... I remember it was really good, but couldn't find it anymore
- severine 8y agoPerhaps this? Learn product design from game designers: http://www.1bytebeta.com/learn-product-design-fromgame-designers/ http://www.1bytebeta.com/learn-product-design-fromgame-desig... But the links seems dead. On the other hand, a DDG search with that title brings up some seemly links: 3 Things Software Product Designers Need To Learn From Game Designers: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/09/10/3-things-software-product-designers-need-to-learn-from-game-designers/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/09/10/3-things-softw... What Game UX Can Teach Designers about Product Design: https://www.toptal.com/designers/ux/game-ux-product-design https://www.toptal.com/designers/ux/game-ux-product-design edit: Duh, Youtube! Sorry, maybe this? Designing emotions - what game creation teaches about design? | Piotr Milewski | TEDxGdynia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fYypN4JawY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fYypN4JawY
- amikazmi 8y agoForgot to mention that the youtube video I saw was in english.. the "What Game UX Can Teach Designers about Product Design" article is pretty great too! thank you for sharing!
- deegles 8y agoThere was one motivational type article about how you should “go first” or “be first” when approaching problems in life. Like when making friends or just socially in general. I was looking for it again recently but couldn’t find it.
- charlysl 8y agoI don't know about the link, but if you are interested in the subject I think that you would enjoy this lecture: MIT Math for CS, Matching Problems: https://youtu.be/5RSMLgy06Ew https://youtu.be/5RSMLgy06Ew tldw: it can be mathematically proven that the best strategy is to take the initiative when looking for a partner/job/vacancy, starting with your prefered choice and working down from there, and let others shoot you down if need be
- bllguo 8y agoThe matching problem was actually the first algorithm we discussed in my discrete math class
- Y7ZCQtNo39 8y agoI'm sure the article is a nice read, but I think you summarized it quite well. Gotta take the initiative on things.
- unimpressive 8y agoIt was a post or discussion, I think involving Peter Thiel talking about how innovation is in the world of bits not atoms now and that implies some unpleasant things about our society. Closest I could find was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718654
- severine 8y agoWhat about this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5641799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5641799 In Tech We Trust? A Debate with Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen [video] (milkeninstitute.org) 74 points by jordn on May 2, 2013 | 39 comments The original video link seems dead, I guess it's this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtZbWnIALeE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtZbWnIALeE
- unimpressive 8y agoI think this was probably it (just reached that point in the video where Thiel says the money quote). Thanks.
- gdulli 8y agoFYI if it's the bits/atoms treatment you're specifically interested in reading about, it goes back to at least 1995 from Nicholas Negroponte. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Digital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Digital
- liamzebedee 8y agoA paper some time back about performing large-scale host computations through (ab)using the TCP handshake for arithmetic.
- fawind 8y agoBarbarasi et al., Parasitic computing, 2001 [1] [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/35091039 https://www.nature.com/articles/35091039
- liamzebedee 8y agoBeen looking for this on and off for over 5 years, thank you.
- ianseyer 8y agoSomeone posted a comment mentioning that coffee shops are a good metric for cultural development when trying to look for a new city
- severine 8y agoThere's this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10391753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10391753 How to know if where you live is “up and coming”: fried chicken vs. coffee shops (medium.com) 326 points by edward on Oct 15, 2015 | 306 comments https://medium.com/@Sam_Floy/how-to-know-if-where-you-live-is-up-and-coming-fried-chicken-vs-coffee-shops-546080119f98 https://medium.com/@Sam_Floy/how-to-know-if-where-you-live-i...
- daveguy 8y agoCompletely disagree about the fried chicken part of the equation. The more fried chicken the better.
- Ar-Curunir 8y agoThat metric is so implicitly bigoted it's funny
- ceceron 8y agoSomeone sent a link to a simple programming online game. Player had to provide isntruction for an character walking araound a square level, gathering stars. Never could find it again after a month...
- jonafato 8y agoDoesn't sound like this is what you're looking for, but LightBot (http://lightbot.com/ http://lightbot.com/) is a wonderful game with similar sounding game play.
- ceceron 8y agoThanks :) When I was looking for the forgotten game, I crawled through the internet and found almost any other available title (LightBot also). I'm teaching computer science and try to collect as many tools (e.g. games) to people with no programming experience.
- zerostar07 8y agoOff topic, but browsers should be appending the referrer page in the history list when openning a new browser tab. Countless times i've lost an article because i opened a link and much later discovered i had somehow closed the opener page.
- Darkenetor 8y agoThis saved me a lot of time for these cases https://github.com/program-in-chinese/HistoryInThreads_WebExtension https://github.com/program-in-chinese/HistoryInThreads_WebEx...
- zerostar07 8y agovery good. thanks
- deft 8y agoSaving this for later. Bookmark.
- elviejo 8y agoSomeone commented: "how things have changed, emacs and vim are partners and the enemy is Eclipse and Visual Studio" A play on words of an episode in star trek the next generation, where someone from the past wakes up to realize that now humans and Klingons are friends and the enemy are the ferengi and the borg.
- mwilliaams 8y agoHa, the Ferengi are never really an enemy. They just want that latinum.
- taejo 8y agoThe AI does not love you. Nor does it hate you. But you are made of atoms which it can use for something else.
- keksicus 8y ago>ferengi I'm sure you mean Cardassians...
- pcf 8y agoThis thread. I tried to find it a month later, but couldn't remember anything to search for. Regards, future pcf
- jradd 8y agoI was just doing this yesterday. Trying to find an article describing simple devices that use no external power to send a basic on/off signal (TX–only) over wireless (802.11 I think?). Anyways, it was said to be used for simple applications that send a wireless signal to a receiver when the laundry detergent gets too low. Sort of like Amazon's push button thingies.
- snops 8y agoThe term you want to Google is "backscatter" I think. I reckon this might have been what you were looking for: https://www.washington.edu/news/2017/12/05/in-first-3-d-printed-objects-connect-to-wifi-without-electronics/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2017/12/05/in-first-3-d-prin...
- edwo 8y agoA blog post about a guy trying out various ways of organizing his projects/filesystem. In the end the guy settles on chronological hierarchy.
- brador 8y agoThis sounds very interesting! Anyone got it?
- shijie 8y agoSomeone once posted a short science fiction story about the animals that became the dominant intelligent species on earth after humans. First it was raccoons, then it was crows, traveling by air balloon. I loved it, and I’ve searched many subsequent times to no avail.
- ahane 8y agoThe piece was posted on The Archdruid Report (https://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com https://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com) and was called "The Next Ten Billion Years". In a bit of an unconventional move, the author has closed down the blog and is now selling the previously free articles as ebooks. There are a lot of valuable perspectives in his writing, so it might very well be worth the purchase. Most of it is not in the "short story format" that you remember though. (http://www.foundershousepublishing.com/ http://www.foundershousepublishing.com/). There might also be an free archive somewhere..
- hoelzro 8y agoI found it on archive.is: http://archive.today/2016.10.25-213332/http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.de/2013/09/the-next-ten-billion-years.html http://archive.today/2016.10.25-213332/http://thearchdruidre... Funny thing - I was thinking about this post a few years ago but also couldn't remember where I'd read it; I ended up writing a program to download the pages I'd visited since 2012 (using a heuristic to discard unlikely entries and to promote likely ones). That's probably the most effort I've gone through to find something on the Internet!
- Teichopsia 8y agoI've been trying to find an email server which was mentioned in a comment a few months ago. I read through the setup instructions - the only point I remember is once it's setup one can add as many domains to it as one wants - if I remember correctly. There were several that popped up this past year, https://mailinabox.email https://mailinabox.email this being one of them but I don't think it was the one I'm talking about. The setup instructions were clear.
- DanBC 8y agoWas it perhaps this? https://github.com/nodemailer/wildduck#wild-duck-mail-server https://github.com/nodemailer/wildduck#wild-duck-mail-server It's had a few submissions, but no discussion.https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wildduck.email https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wildduck.email
- Teichopsia 8y agoThanks but it wasn't that one. The one I'm talking about wasn't in beta and I would like to say one could use any DB one wanted to but that might just be wrong :) Edit: grammar.
- ofrzeta 8y agoEmail server as in "email server bundle", not SMTP server? If yes, there's Mailcow or iRedMail (among others).
- Teichopsia 8y agoThanks. It wasn't either one of those. Now that I remember the one I'm talking about, it's system requirements were low. What comes to mind it could run comfortably on a 512mb system.
- severine 8y agoCitadel? http://www.citadel.org/doku.php?id=features http://www.citadel.org/doku.php?id=features
- jrvarela56 8y agoDunno if this is management 101 but someone mentioned casually the relationship between responsibility and authority. A mismatch between those two creates tension (employee dissatisfaction). I have not found the comment or literature on the subject. Experiences at my day job tell me this is key to org/role design and management in general.
- allenz 8y agoThere are several good articles discussing ARA: http://blog.jbrains.ca/permalink/the-importance-of-aligning-authority-with-responsibility http://blog.jbrains.ca/permalink/the-importance-of-aligning-... https://ssbg.co.nz/about/media/words-with-meaning-the-importance-of-definitions/ https://ssbg.co.nz/about/media/words-with-meaning-the-import... https://www.nais.org/magazine/independent-school/fall-2016/decision-making-alignment/ https://www.nais.org/magazine/independent-school/fall-2016/d... For HN comments specifically, you might have read one of these: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2810365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2810365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7184472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7184472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9767231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9767231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552107
- jrvarela56 8y agoThanks! Seems I still need a couple of ‘Let me google that for you’ sent my way hehe
- hetspookjee 8y agoI read about it about a year ago. It was about a small program with 4 letters and someone posted 2 blog posts about it in a weeks time abusing the tool to see what it can come up with. The tool or program seemed to have an exploitative nature and seemed to be used in the security field. It worked with, I think binary files, but I recall it also allowed other programs to be ran on it. You provided an exit state and an input state and the program it needs to work with and tried all sorts of things within the provided program to reach the provided exit state. The blog post abused it to optimise to something interesting which I can't recall anymore. The writer of the blog post had more experience with it and already liked to toy around with it. It's not angr. Iirc it 2as called something like nmap or jobn. Something with 4 letters and not the most straightforward name. Please help me out.
- nlawalker 8y agoSounds like a fuzzer. Was it American Fuzzy Lop (afl-fuzz)? Doesn't quite meet your 4-letter criteria but sounds like a candidate.
- hetspookjee 8y agoYes! Thank you. No wonder I wasn't able to find it as I strongly held my belief that it was 4 letters. Love this place.
- 3131s 8y agoIt's odd how a word can feel "on the tip of your tongue" and intuitions about its number of sounds and their characteristics can be remarkably accurate, especially if you consider the interposition of linguistically similar sounds. And it can be totally misleading when your memories are incorrect, to the point for me at least of making it nearly impossible to recall a word until I have shifted focus to something else.
- z3t4 8y agoRelated. I sometimes find a good recipe on Google, but next time I want to do it, it's nowhere to be seen. I often find lost HN posts via Google search though. And I always upvote or favorite post's that I might go back to later.
- gdulli 8y agoSomeone posted here a blog from a guy who had a plan to commit suicide at the age of 50. He wrote a lot of articles explaining the reasoning. It was mostly a fear of declining quality of life with age, and a fear of becoming incapacitated at some point and being unable to follow through with euthanasia if he was suffering. It stuck in my head and I'd like to find it again because I couldn't remember if this was something he went through with or if it was hypothetical.
- danielvf 8y agoWe’re you thinking of the author of zeromq? http://hintjens.com/blog:115 http://hintjens.com/blog:115 “A protocol for dying”
- gdulli 8y agoNo, this was someone who was still in good health and wanted to be proactive about avoiding possible future sickness and even just aging. But thanks for posting that.
- deft 8y agoAre you talking about the guy who ended up killing himself, revealing a never ending manifesto-like site upon his suicide? I'd like to find that again myself. EDIT: one google search and here it is: http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-sports-writer-kills-himself-and-leaves-massive-website-explaining-why-2013-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-sports-writer-kills-himsel... The site looks like it's down now though.
- gdulli 8y agoThat's it, thank you! I didn't remember it was a sports writer, I assumed it was someone who worked in tech since I had found it here. And here's a working mirror: http://martin-manley.eprci.com/ http://martin-manley.eprci.com/
- arjunbajaj 8y agoA service that converts PDF research papers into a clean readable webpage. Their example paper was a research paper with two columns and diagrams to show their service actually works well. I searched a couple of times but couldn't find them again...
- allenz 8y agoProbably this demo: http://coolwanglu.github.io/pdf2htmlEX/demo/demo.html http://coolwanglu.github.io/pdf2htmlEX/demo/demo.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4528797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4528797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5657988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5657988
- arjunbajaj 8y agoI have stumbled upon this, but unfortunately, this is not it. That was a hosted web service and it extracted the text and figures from the research paper but didn't maintain the structure. You could read it on a phone too. I remember it didn't work on all research papers but was slowly expanding its database of supported papers. There was a place to paste the URL of a research paper to be processed.
- severine 8y agoSounds like pdf2htmlEX. Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5657988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5657988 Pdf2htmlEX – Convert PDF to HTML without losing text or format (github.com) 161 points by coolwanglu on May 5, 2013 | 48 comments http://coolwanglu.github.io/pdf2htmlEX/demo/demo.html http://coolwanglu.github.io/pdf2htmlEX/demo/demo.html (Demo of research paper) http://coolwanglu.github.io/pdf2htmlEX/ http://coolwanglu.github.io/pdf2htmlEX/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- slow_donkey 8y agoFwiw I've looked into these sorts of tools in the past for a work project and none of them work very well. Converting HTML to PDF is a solved problem but the other way around never comes out clean. If your document structure is p simple it might be fine but I wouldn't bother for anything else.
- catblathrow 8y agoA synopsis of a short story where the protagonist writes -1 every day. Can’t find the story, nor the comment. My memory of this is also very fuzzy at this point so it might be a completely different idea.
- chegra 8y agoAn article about an MIT student and his friend who eventually committed suicide, talking about the n+1.
- godot 8y agoThere was a thread about interviewing, someone talking about how hard interviewing was and failing dozens of them even as a senior engineer. (there is a thread about that once every month or two, indeed) A commenter responded saying something along the lines of, "When you find the right fit/role, the interview will seem suspiciously easy." I thought it was interesting because it's such a huge anecdote without any ways of backing it up, but for some reasons it does match my own experience in the past decade+ for almost every job offer I've landed (a handful). For every interview where I felt like I struggled really hard (even though in the end I was able to solve the problems the interviewers asked), I did not get offers. For the ones I did land, it always seemed really easy and somewhat like "what? is that it?"
- allenz 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16200322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16200322
- allenz 8y agoMeta: I use https://hn.algolia.com https://hn.algolia.com to search HN. It has a nice interface that shows full comments rather than snippets.
- slow_donkey 8y agoHm I actually have a custom search in chrome that uses Google for hn. It's essentially %s%20site:news.ycombinator.com I love algolia for record searching (lists of items) but find Googles indexing superior for general queries.
- losvedir 8y agoI think it was on HN. It was a quote to the effect that the world changes by just a handful of great people, not by the small contributions of billions.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoAn avalanche can be started by a single snowflake, but that doesn't mean a single snowflake is an avalanche.
- hgdsraj 8y agoSomething about someone smelling cake or a bakery in their neighborhood when there wasn't one, but it turned out to be chemicals leaching from the ground due to what was there years ago and buried.
- throw501 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14566057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14566057
- kaybe 8y agoI was looking for that startup that looks into research for your rare illness. Did they stop existing?
- auganov 8y agoApparently https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaMed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaMed
- spython 8y agoThere was a blog post on the significance of crocodiles in Russian culture. Mainly, that they are used as 'sensitive, educated outsider' characters. Not sure if it was on HN, though.
- yobert 8y agoA post about a startup that was trying to create an open database of algorithmic ways to treat patients. I've tried and tried to find this with HN's search engine, but can't seem to pick the right search terms.
- davak 8y agoI am physician. Would love to work on a decision support tool...
- severine 8y agoWild guess: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5599134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5599134 Counsyl is Pioneering A New Bioinformatics Wave (113 points by daslee on Apr 24, 2013 | 47 comments) http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/23/counsyl/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/23/counsyl/
- sprintf 8y agoSomeone created a site that compared flash memory storage prices (USB stick, SD card, SSD) and they posted the link in some comment, but I can't find the HN comment and a Google search doesn't find it either.
- Immortalin 8y agoAn interactive fiction posted a few years ago with gothic black text against a white background
- thusly 8y agoWow, great timing. Around a week ago I spent an hour digging through my bookmarks for something I'd found via HN, and I must not have bookmarked. I can't recall what the original post linked to, but in the comments someone discussed their preferred method of organizing their digital notes/journal. They linked to a forum post where someone described the system. It involved using a single folder for all notes, with different categories, that were indicated in the file name. In fact the file name contained everything important. It also discussed never altering a file, but creating an index to refer to other related entries. I think the person who wrote the forum post was a journalist of some sort? And they might have made reference to a Japanese system that was similar, but physical, which used lines on the top of index cards to indicate categories, and keeping the number of categories low (always 4?) was important. I'd love to find that forum post again.
- spython 8y agoNot what you are searching, but I found Notational Velocity (http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/ http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/) indispensable for quick note-taking. It is very lightweight, and I have a shortcut bound to it, so I'm always just a shortcut away from writing down notes. Searching for notes is just as fast, and with a flat file structure for data it is easily synchronized across devices.
- ATDrake 8y agoThe index card version of that note-taking system sounds somewhat like Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten or Pile of Index Cards, which have both had some posts describing them linked on HN previously: http://takingnotenow.blogspot.ca/2007/12/luhmanns-zettelkasten.html http://takingnotenow.blogspot.ca/2007/12/luhmanns-zettelkast... https://zettelkasten.de/posts/zettelkasten-improves-thinking-writing/ https://zettelkasten.de/posts/zettelkasten-improves-thinking... http://pileofindexcards.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page http://pileofindexcards.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/cluster/ http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/cluster/ Another HN post from the zettelkasten.de domain had a comment with a link to this project on Github, which sounds a lot like the filename-based system you mention, at least in terms of putting all the info into the filename: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16611413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16611413 https://github.com/galfarragem/superfolder https://github.com/galfarragem/superfolder Maybe it's not the one you were looking for, but could be useful anyway?
- sdiq 8y agoAbout 4 years ago, I saw a post about a startup, I think, that was going to revolutionise hiring top talent - or something similar. I think there was a Nigerian among the founders. I haven't been able to find the same again.
- corporateslaver 8y agoWas that the one with the Nigerian prince?
- leifg 8y agoI don‘t know if it was HN or not but it could have been here. Anyway, I read about this concept of a 6 day week (with a 2 day weekend) without losing any productivity. The key was that the society is going to be split in 3 groups so that every group would have 2 different days off. The overlap for any 2 groups is only 2 days. I find this highly interesting and have since tried to find out more about it.
- chewxy 8y agoQuite sure I read a paper about graph/code sharing in functional languages and why it's harder than expected. The one paper I didn't save and catalogue... is the one I want to refer to
- teehemkay 8y agoAn article about someone telling his experience of slowly growing a business (targeted at school teacher if I remember correctly) year after year eventually led to a sizeable lifestyle business.
- jamdav16 8y agoIf you find this, please let me know!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- nekopa 8y agoI think you are looking for user patio11 on here...
- saeranv 8y agoI think this article specifically https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-business-on-5-hours-a-week/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-busi...?
- bklaasen 8y agoAn extraordinary long-form piece about a child who'd been born deaf (perhaps of Latino origin, growing up in the streets of a US city) and was then abandoned by his parents. He hadn't learned to speak. As an adult he was given help by a charity (or research group?) who, over the course of years, taught him to speak. There's a moment described in the article when he finally realises that all objects have names, and bursts into tears. When asked to recall how he thought about the world before he learned to speak, he could not describe his cognition.
- garrettgrimsley 8y agoThat sounds like the story of Ildefonso. I originally heard the story on Radiolab [0] and it is also the subject of a book [1] by Susan Schaller called "A Man WithoutWords" [0] https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/91725-words/ https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/91725-words/ [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_Without_Words https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_Without_Words
- billconan 8y agoA blog post by a pythics PHD (or may be biolog or chemistry, I don’t remember.) about the sad state of utility software in his/her area of study. The software the author developed during the PhD program has become the acedemic standard.
- rkda 8y agoNot sure if it was on HN but it was a short story about an old retired sys admin in an age where everything runs on the cloud. One day, something went wrong in a data center and he was called to fix it because robots manage everything now and nobody knows how to fix things anymore. He was accompanied by a younger sysadmin IT person as he fixed a server or something. By the end of it, the younger IT person wanted to learn about how computer works and be a sysadmin.
- icc97 8y agoReminds me of the sysadmin XKCD: https://xkcd.com/705/ https://xkcd.com/705/
- rkda 8y agoHeh. That's always a good one. I'm not sure anymore if I found it here or on Nat Torkington's four short links.
- rkda 8y agoI found it! It's Hardware Guy http://praxagora.com/fiction/hardware_guy/ http://praxagora.com/fiction/hardware_guy/
- earenndil 8y agoA comment about how we are entering a dark age in science. I can't quite remember the whole argument, nor the subject of the post it was on, but it was fascinating.
- kristjansson 8y agoI found a link to a SaaS product that provided full-document search across a variety of cloud app platforms, chiefly Google and Atlassian. I spent nearly an afternoon searching for it a few months later to no avail...
- jesseendahl 8y agoThere was a really interesting post against Elon Musk’s argument that AI will destroy us all. The article made lots of counter arguments about why AI won’t destroy us all. I can’t find it even after lots of searching.
- Hirak 8y agoThis one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14807818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14807818
- jesseendahl 8y agoNope not that one unfortunately, but thank you! :) I vaguely recall it being a pretty long blog post that walked through various scenarios. The formatting/design of the site was pretty plain/old school.
- htwillie 8y agoWithin the last year, a guy did a writeup on his DIY electrical panel circuit monitoring setup. It allowed him to very accurately measure power consumption of everything in his house, and he was able to trace a sudden and mysterious rise in his monthly bill to a faulty pool pump.
- boanoite 8y agoA month ago or so, a guy made an article about the fact that machine learning was not necessary everytime and go be replaced by some good old SQL queries. Spoke about it with a client of mine, but could not find the link to send him. Thanks in advance if you find it !
- lkki 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16898827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16898827
- ai_ia 8y agoThere was an article with a slideshow embedded about how to make good presentations. It consisted of choosing fonts and stuffs. It was really interesting. I thought I had bookmarked it but I lost it somehow.
- ptman 8y agoI don't know if it was on HN, but I remember reading about productivity research concerning the length of the workweek. IIRC 25h week improved productivity compared to 40h. The study may have been done in Germany. But I haven't been able to find it or similar studies of high quality since.
- wodenokoto 8y agoI got this one of reddit a long time ago[1], but maybe someone here knows where to find it. A blog post laying out why Japan prefers "gadgets" over PCs, due to their complex writing system requiring more RAM, causing all early PCs to be more expensive. The post was really well written with pictures and price comparisons between US and Japanese versions of (if memory serves me right) Amigas and Commodores and other systems. [1] Maybe before the release of the iPhone, but definitely before the release in Japan
- knrz 8y agoI read an article on SlateStarCodex that talked about how a local decision could not take into account the obvious global decision, i.e. it expanded on Game Theory by detailing how the omniscient decision isn't possible from a first-person perspective. P.S. If anyone can help me find it, I'd appreciate it. I last spent an hour trying to find it :P
- thiht 8y agoThere was a guy who posted some comments explaining how the industry basically doesn't know exactly why some batteries work better than others, and that the research in this domain is a lot like "nobody know wtf they are doing". There was also this one comment by a guy explaining that the components used in Apple devices are "premium" components coming from the first batches, and that they make Apple's hardware more reliable than another computer with the same components
- rgovind 8y agoThe post on why medium.com could have been profitable as a lifestyle business but since it took VC money, it should resort to spamming users with recommendations etc
- janulrich 8y agoAn explanation about grounding in our electricity system came to be. It went through the evolution of just having positive and negative to various ways of adding grounding until we get to the grounding we have today. I seem to remember it being a Reddit comment or something similar.
- gt2 8y agoSomeone recommending a podcast on the occult and other related topics by a guy associated with the Village Voice. Within the last month!
- dhoman 8y agoThere was an article about russian bots on aws clicking google ad words of sites also hosted by russians on aws. they were basically hosted a fake net to generate google ad word money. can't find the link anywhere anymore